NEH Awards Rice $400,000 Grant

NEH Awards Rice $400,000 Grant

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY

Rice News Staff
Dec. 10, 1998

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced Tuesday the award of a $400,000 four-to-one matching grant to Rice’s Center for the Study of Cultures to attract distinguished visiting professors.

The grant, totaling $2 million with the matching funds, will be used to attract some of the world’s top scholars from a variety of fields to Rice for extended periods of time, said David Nirenberg, director of the center and associate professor of history at Rice. The NEH grant of $400,000 will be matched by $1,600,000 in nonfederal funds.

The money will allow the center to bring six internationally known scholars to Rice each year. These scholars would come to campus for from two weeks to a full semester and engage in activities ranging from minicourses for undergraduate and graduate students to full semester courses. A series of lectures or even a conference might be organized around the work of some scholars.

“By enabling relatively extended visits by foreign scholars, it would represent a significant step in internationalizing the intellectual universe of the Rice faculty and student body,” Nirenberg said.

The Center for the Study of Cultures provides an interdisciplinary forum for faculty in the humanities and social sciences with the aim of facilitating Rice’s participation in national and international debates. The center also serves as an umbrella for study groups, workshops and special projects at Rice by providing financial and organizational support for symposia, conferences and lectures by internationally recognized speakers.

“I am very pleased that the National Endowment for the Humanities has recognized the importance of our Center for the Study of Cultures by awarding us $400,000 to bring distinguished visiting professors to Rice University,” said Judith Brown, dean of the School of Humanities. “The award will enable Rice to invite some of the top scholars in the nation to help enrich our scholarly and educational activities in the humanities and social sciences.

“At the same time, the visiting scholars will benefit from their interactions with Rice faculty and students and will contribute to Rice’s growing reputation throughout the nation. This is a wonderful award and a tribute to the center and the faculty associated with it.”

In addition to the NEH grant, last fall the center received an initial grant of $100,000 from the Rockwell Fund Inc. to endow the center’s postdoctoral program. The program consists of two two-year postdoctoral fellowships. The two fellows will be selected during alternating years from a national pool of applicants, and each will teach two courses per academic year.