Description
The National Humanities Center (NHC), based in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, requests ongoing support for its East Asia Scholars Program. The program is part of the Center’s efforts to increase the diversity of its fellows, including through more international representation. Our grant would fund nine-month residential fellowships for humanities scholars nominated by East Asian universities, supporting three fellows per year over four years. It would be matched with an approximately equal amount from the NHC and the partner universities—Shanghai Jiaotong and Fudan in Shanghai, Tsinghua in Beijing, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National Taiwan University, National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
A Luce grant in 2013 launched an earlier version of this program. When Robert Newman succeeded Geoffrey Harpham as NHC director in 2015, he took steps to improve the program’s design, traveling to Asia to negotiate new memoranda of understanding with participating universities, whose number was expanded from five to nine. Each university can nominate up to three scholars per round, who are considered through the rigorous selection process used for all NHC fellowship programs. The NHC has constituted an advisory committee of Asia scholars in the U.S. and initiated video interviews with all applicants. Newman is confident that the changes made to the program have elevated standards and improved the applicant pool. The fellowship provides selected scholars time to reflect, conceptualize and write. While they have no responsibilities other than to pursue their research, they are invited to attend the Center’s public lectures and performances, participate in professional development workshops, and engage formally and informally with peer fellows, about 40 annually, through seminars, reading groups and other activities. The NHC offers library services, and the Research Triangle area provides a rich ecosystem of other academic and cultural resources. Our grant would cover housing, dining, office space, library and IT services, health insurance, local transportation and visas for the selected scholars, as well as a portion of NHC staff time for program administration and library support. The partner universities are responsible for the salary and international travel of their selected nominees. NHC trustees have committed funds for Newman’s annual trip to Asia to meet with partner universities, and for research collaborations on interdisciplinary topics such as digital humanities (participation from Fudan) and environmental humanities (participation from Fudan and Nanyang Technological University). Since 1978, the NCH has been dedicated to supporting, stimulating and disseminating scholarship in the humanities. Among fellows supported by our prior grant, historian Seung-joon Lee of the National University of Singapore writes that the experience “profoundly changed the depth and breadth of my book manuscript,” entitled Labor, Energy, and the Politics of Eating in Industrial China . Biwu Shang, professor of English at Shanghai Jiaotong, completed Unnatural Narratives Across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge 2019) and was tenured upon return to Shanghai. It is worth noting that a $1.5 million grant to the NHC through Higher Education in 2000 endowed a Henry Luce Foundation Senior Fellow, with a scholar chosen annually from the fields of American art, Asian studies or theology.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a four-year grant of $615,000 to the National Humanities Center to support an expanded East Asia Scholars Program.
