Chatham Professor Selected as Periclean Faculty Leader

Lou Martin, associate professor of history, has been selected as a Periclean Faculty Leader (PFL) through the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leaders Program in the Humanities. Dr. Martin will receive a grant that supports his teaching and other civic engagement activities at Chatham. The Mellon Foundation and The Eugene M. Lang Foundation support this program. 

Project Pericles staff and a group of distinguished academic external evaluators reviewed the applications, with one commenting, “The faculty involved are well prepared to succeed and should be congratulated for their outstanding efforts. The humanities are in good hands with these faculty.”

The grant will partly support Professor Martins’s “Oral History and Coalfield Communities” class. In this class, students learn about the history of coal-mining communities, the ethics of oral history, and techniques for doing oral history interviews. Working with a community partner, the Center for Coalfield Justice, students will interview coalfield residents, and the recordings will be archived at the Center and the West Virginia and Regional History Center. An integral part of doing oral history interviews is learning to listen respectfully and empowering the interviewee to share their story in their own way. One goal of the project is to encourage a broader understanding of social responsibility by including coalfield communities in discussions of the policy changes that climate change necessitates.

Periclean Faculty Leaders are a group of committed scholars dedicated to incorporating civic engagement into the curriculum while empowering students to use their academic knowledge to tackle real-world problems. Through the support of this program, they are leaders on campus and within a larger national context.