Enduring Questions
This program funds the development of an undergraduate course that grapples with an “enduring question” in the humanities. A proposed course should be taught by one instructor and focus on a single question that has been asked over the centuries. For example, What is the good life? Is there a human nature, and if so, what is it?
Guidelines URL: www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/EnduringQuestions.html

AQ-50047, Case Western Reserve University:
Enduring Questions: Pilot Course on “Nature and Culture.”
Project Director Anne Helmreich of Case Western Reserve University received a 2009 grant to develop an undergraduate seminar to explore the connections between culture and human views of nature. The investigation of these questions is structured around three thematic units: 1) the garden; 2) literary forms that focus on rural life; and 3) the wilderness. The theme of each of these units unfolds chronologically through primary texts and related art such as the Book of Genesis; the Idylls of Theocritus; poems of Pope and Wordsworth; works by Jefferson, Burke, and Rousseau; and paintings by Poussin and Frederick Edwin Church.

AQ-50002, University of Tulsa:
Enduring Questions in the Humanities: Mortality and Meaning, God and Suffering.
Project Director Jacob Howland of the University of Tulsa received a 2009 grant to develop a freshman course on the problem of mortality and meaning: whether death negates the meaning of a human life and, if not, whether faith is possible for a thoughtful human being. Students will read a diverse array of texts, including works by Plato, Thucydides, Donne, Shelley, Dostoyevsky, Richard Wright, and Primo Levi.