Funding

Discipline(s): All

Jessica DeSpain, PhD, is a professor of English and co-founder of SIUE’s SIUE College of Arts and Sciences’ Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics (IRIS CENTER). She has been an active leader and collaborator on various digital humanities projects that involve communities in utilizing digital capabilities to share their cultures, histories, and experiences. These projects in, include collaboration with the STEM Center on the Digital East St. Louis Project and direction of the Conversation Toward a Brighter Future 2.0 program.

DeSpain was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) William and Margaret Going Endowed Professorship Award in 2018, in recognition of her excellence in teaching and scholarship. The Going Award is the College’s most distinguished award and is bestowed upon faculty who have produced outstanding scholarship and have connected that scholarship in fundamental ways to their teaching and transformed students’ lives.

Additionally, in 2020, DeSpain helped SIUE advance its role of leading a national effort to recover forgotten and little-known literature by women authors in digital environments. With the support of a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, which was renewed in 2023, Dr. DeSpain led a team of 20 collaborators from across the country in the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers project.

DeSpain’s most expansive project on SIUE’s campus began in 2017, when she launched the exploratory and planning stage of the Community-Oriented Digital Engagement Scholars CODES program, with support from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) planning grant. The planning stage of the project was designed to examine innovative humanities programming. DeSpain was subsequently awarded an NEH implementation grant in 2021 to support implementation of the CODES program, which she now directs.  What emerged from this work is an alternative general education curriculum that aligns with all undergraduate majors and programs at SIUE. In 2024, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded DeSpain and SIUE a $1 million grant to expand the CODES program to involve 100 SIUE undergraduate students.

In this video Dr. DeSpain shares her research journey from early grant proposal writing to expanding the CODES program with funding from the NEH and later the Mellon Foundation. More information about the process of working with the Office of Research and Projects can be found on our Internal Funding page.