The NEH expects participants to attend all scheduled sessions of the seminar and to engage fully with it during the five weeks that they will spend in Charlottesville.  Although the syllabus will offer considerable amounts of reading, its proceedings will not depend on formal day-to-day considerations of these materials or on participant presentations other than those that they may wish to volunteer as we proceed.  ROOTS is not a “class”.  Rather, the responsibilities of seminar participants will center on developing the individual research projects that they will have described in their applications, contributing their own expertise informally to colleagues from other regional fields (and academic disciplines), and presenting interim reflections during the seminar’s concluding week on what they have learned.

At the end of the Seminar, participants will be asked to submit evaluations to the NEH in standard electronic format, in which they consider their experiences in the Seminar, review their work during the summer, and assess its value to their personal and professional development;  these assessments become part of the project’s permanent grant file.  Past “Roots” seminar participants have collaborated in various ways, including panels at international scholarly meetings and special issues of journals.  The full value of the seminar experience will, of course, emerge only over many years, in the course of its participants’ ongoing research and teaching and their sharing of the pan-Atlantic perspectives they will have developed with colleagues and students across regional fields and across academic disciplines that the seminar is intended to facilitate.