Stanford Report, February 9, 2005

Humanities Center receives 600K challenge grant from NEH

Stanford is one of only four universities to receive a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in its most recent competition. The award pledges endowment of $600,000 to support the Humanities Center's Research Workshop Program.

"The tremendous vote of confidence conveyed by this NEH award will bring attention to research in the humanities and help friends of the center appreciate the dynamism of Stanford's faculty and graduate students," said Humanities Center Director John Bender, the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies.

To tap the $600,000 NEH Challenge Grant (a type of matching grant), the center must raise $2.4 million, four times the amount of the federal pledge.

The center was established in 1980 to promote interdisciplinary humanistic research and education at Stanford and nationwide through workshops, fellowships and public presentations. For details, visit http://shc.stanford.edu.

In announcing the award, NEH Chairman Bruce Cole wrote: "Evaluators were especially impressed with the way the Stanford Humanities Center's research workshops serve the humanities by facilitating the exchange of ideas within and across disciplines. They lauded the center's mix of faculty and graduate students, noting that the students especially would benefit from having their ideas and hypotheses put to the test of expert scholars from Stanford and other universities."

The workshop program has funded more than 60 unique workshops and involved the participation of more than a third of the humanities faculty and hundreds of graduate students since its inception in 1995. Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, faculty coordinator for the Philosophical Reading Group workshop, said: "There seems to be not a single scholar among the most renowned and most active humanists at Stanford who has not been involved, in one way or the other," in the workshops.

With topics ranging from Asian and Asian American studies to archaeology and from music and aesthetics to social ethics, the workshops allow faculty and graduate students to define cross-disciplinary domains of research, present work in progress and discuss the latest developments in their fields. The workshops also build research communities across the Bay Area and beyond through an "open door" policy that invites scholars from elsewhere to participate freely. These visiting scholars, as well as Stanford faculty and students, testify to the integral role the workshops play in their intellectual and professional development. This kind of program exists nowhere else at Stanford and only at a very few other research universities and institutes.

With this challenge grant, the center now has a significant development opportunity to secure the future of these workshops by creating a permanent endowment for the program. Together with the recent Andrew W. Mellon Foundation pledge of $1 million in matching funds, this NEH grant will allow the center to build on its strong record of success in raising matching funds. For those who would like to assist, contact Susan Sebbard at sebbard@stanford.edu or 723-3053.