Purdue University faculty has created a Howard Zinn Memorial Research Award Fund in American Studies. This award is open to all Purdue University students majoring in American Studies, and offers at least $1,000 annually to “support interdisciplinary American Studies research focusing on the ways in which forms of social, cultural, intellectual, and technoscientific expression circulate among, between, and beyond the geographical borders of the United States. The resulting research will highlight the interconnected roles that gender, race, sexuality, class, science, technology, medicine, music, art, and design play in the continual redefinition of the United States.”
BACKGROUND
In 2013, the Associated Press published an article disclosing that Purdue University President Mitch Daniels tried to ban Howard Zinn’s books in public schools while he was governor of Indiana. Fundraising for this award began in 2014, with endowment funding secured in 2017, as an effort to counter this censorship and to increase the type of scholarship Howard Zinn promoted: “on the men and women typically left out of the master narrative — dissenters, African Americans, Native Americans, women, working people, and other underrepresented groups or a derivative area of research.”
The next award will be given in 2019. For updates and more information, visit Zinn Memorial Research Award.
