Two Rice faculty earn Fulbright grants

Two Rice faculty earn Fulbright grants

BY HEATHER MCLEAN WIEDERHOEFT
Special to the Rice News

Gregory Barnett, assistant professor of musicology, and Charles Henry, vice provost and university librarian, have been awarded Fulbright Scholar grants. They are two of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright Scholar Program.

Barnett’s Fulbright research will be based out of the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy, and will focus on ballroom and theatrical dance in late 17th-century Italy.

”Currently, little is known about dance practices from this era, and I hope to shed some light not only on how Italians danced at this time, but also on the social contexts and allegorical meanings connected with specific performances,” Barnett said.

Barnett will be conducting research in Bologna, Modena, Parma and possibly Turin. He will be in Italy for eight months, with the first five supported by the Fulbright Award and the summer months made possible via a stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Barnett previously received a Fulbright II-E fellowship while working on his dissertation at Princeton.

Henry’s award is for a six-month appointment to the University of Zilina in the Slovak Republic, and his lectures will be on ”Transforming Higher Education Administration: New Models of Knowledge Organization, Discovery and Distribution.”

”The focus of my grant is on the vast scale and complexity of online information as it pertains to higher education,” Henry said. ”I’ll be attempting to bring together the many threads of activity that touch upon research, teaching, publication and library organization to present a coherent understanding of the potential consequences of the changes taking place.” Topics that Henry will address include the rise of large-scale digital library projects, new models of scholarly publications, recognizing the importance of the virtual campus and changes in the nature of undergraduate education.

Henry has previously received a Fulbright senior scholar grant for library sciences in New Zealand and a Fulbright award for the study of medieval literature in Vienna, Austria.

The Fulbright Scholar Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.