Portland Press Herald reporter Colin Woodard has been appointed to lead a project at Salve Regina University examining America’s identity.

Woodard is on sabbatical for a year as the paper’s state and national affairs reporter and will return to the Press Herald in 2024.

Woodard, a New York Times best-selling author, historian and award-winning journalist, will lead the new program at Salve Regina’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy in Newport, Rhode Island.

The lab will seek to “articulate a story of America’s national identity that helps bind the union together in the 21st century,” the university said in a statement.

The Nationhood Lab, according to the statement, will include a data journalism website where Woodard and other authors will reflect on divisions in American society and what might be done to bind them; a narrative project to develop a new story of American civic nationalism; and efforts to share that story to help address divisiveness in American public life.

Woodard was a visiting senior fellow at the Pell Center last year and is the author of six books, including “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” and “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United Nations Nationhood.” As a reporter with the Press Herald, he received a George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

He is a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago and a past Pew Fellow in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Study.

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