The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded three grants to professors and a project at Brown - Professor of Comparative Literature Arnold Weinstein, Professor of Anthropology Stephen Houston and the Women Writers Project.
A two-year, $250,000 grant was awarded to the Women Writers Project, headed by Julia Flanders, associate director for textbase development at Computing and Information Services. The grant will fund a series of seminars to help professors and graduate students in the humanities understand the processes used to produce digital texts, the ways in which editing processes differ in the electronic medium and the resulting implications for teaching such material, Flanders said.
Houston, a scholar of the Mayan civilization, received a $40,000 fellowship that will allow him to spend a year working on a new book.
"My goal is to write a biography of a Maya city," Houston said. After spending five years on an archeological dig in Piedras Negras, a Maya ruin on the border of Guatemala and Mexico, Houston's challenge now is to turn the vast quantity of information he has into a compelling narrative while remaining true to the evidence, he said. The grant will enable him to spend the year focusing on his writing.
Writing will also be a primary focus for Weinstein, whose $24,000 fellowship will allow him to complete a book about Scandinavian literature. Weinstein said he has been researching the topic for at least a decade and a half and has already written a manuscript.
"It turns out that most of the book is essentially written," he said in a phone interview from Stockholm, where he is finishing work on the book. The grant from the NEH, he said, will help him complete it.
Weinstein's book will explore several types of Scandinavian media, including visual art, film, theater and fiction. According to Weinstein, a major challenge will be to balance the book's public and academic qualities - making the material exciting to an audience that knows little about it while at the same time producing a work of scholarly worth.
In Sweden, Weinstein is consulting museums in the Stockholm area for the book's visuals. "Above all, there is the task of the crucial final revisions to my manuscript and putting the finishing touches on what I've written," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. "Most of the research has been done, but not all, so there will be ample work on all these fronts to occupy me."
An independent agency of the United States government, the NEH is the largest sponsor of humanities programs in the nation and provides grants to promote research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.
