Wiener named fellow at National Humanities Center

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Martin Wiener, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History, has been named a fellow at the National Humanities Center (NHC) for the 2011-12 academic year. He will use the John P. Birkelund Fellowship to pursue his research on “Liberalism and the British Empire.”

	MARTIN WIENER

Martin joins 31 other distinguished scholars from the faculties of 21 colleges and universities in 10 states and also from universities in South Africa and the United Kingdom as an NHC fellow.

“I am deeply grateful for the opportunity the fellowship affords to spend the year at probably the leading residential institute in this country for humanistic studies,” Martin said. “I look forward to meeting other scholars brought together from all over the country and abroad, and to completing my current work on the role of liberal ideas in the history of the British Empire during my year of residence.”

Wiener, the eighth faculty member from Rice University to be named an NHC fellow, was selected from more than 400 applicants. He will spend the academic year at the NHC, located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

The newly named fellows constitute the 34th class of resident scholars to be admitted since the center opened in 1978. The NHC awards nearly $1.5 million in individual fellowship grants to enable scholars to take leave from their normal academic duties and pursue research at the center. This funding is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and by contributions from alumni of the center.

The NHC is a privately incorporated independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978 it has awarded fellowships to more than 1,200 scholars in the humanities, whose work at the center has resulted in the publication of more than 1,300 books in all fields of humanistic study.