By Katie Perry, NDAA staff writer
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently awarded eight Notre Dame faculty members with research fellowships in their respective fields. Notre Dame has garnered 37 NEH fellowships in the past nine years, more than any university in the nation. The University of Michigan ranks second with 27, followed by Harvard University at 23 and Princeton University at 18.
Mark W. Roche, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters attributes ND’s remarkable success to three factors. “First, incentives that encourage fellowship applications from faculty members; second, a superb support structure in the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts; and third, and most importantly, the outstanding quality of our faculty across a range of disciplines,” he says.
Scholars must compete for fellowships with other scholars from the very best universities in the country, says Kenneth Garcia, associate director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA). ISLA keeps faculty informed of upcoming grant and fellowship opportunities, as well as assists in the overall preparation of proposals.
“As a Catholic institution, Notre Dame has traditionally been very strong in the liberal arts,” Garcia says. “It has become even stronger in recent decades with the hiring of some of the nation's top scholars, and this is reflected in the fellowship statistics.”
This year’s NEH recipients from the College of Arts and Letters are:
- Joseph Amar, professor of classics and concurrent professor of theology, for a book titled Ephrem the Syrian: An Intellectual and Cultural Biography
- Sotirios Barber, professor of political science, for American Constitutional Failure and Success
- Li Guo, associate professor of classics, for Ibn Daniyal, A Medieval Muslim Entertainer and his World
- Thomas A. Kselman, professor of history, for Conversion and Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France
- Peter Martens, visiting assistant professor of theology, for Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Christian Traditions in Hadrian’s ‘Introduction to the Divine Scriptures’
- Christian Moevs, associate professor of romance languages and literatures, for Dante’s Commedia and the Mysticism of the Contemplative Tradition
- Samuel Newlands, assistant professor of philosophy, for Reconceiving Benedict Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Ethics
- John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, for The Spirit of Twelfth-Century Europe: Reason and Revolt, Reading and Romance, in a World of Custom
NEH fellowships support advanced research that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public’s understanding of the humanities. Recipients often produce articles, monographs on specialized topics, books on broad topics, archeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools.
In all, 260 scholars nationwide received fellowships and faculty research awards in the 2008 NEH award cycle.
