Faculty receive large NEH grants

Michael Ryan was given a $500,000 grant to use for the library's Schoenberg Center. Two Penn faculty members have won prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Washington-based funding agency announced last week. Michael Ryan, the director of special collections at Van Pelt Library, and Mark Adams, the graduate chair of the History and Sociology of Science Department, will receive a collective $530,000 to further initiatives highlighted by a panel of experts for their "significance, originality and general excellence," according to NEH spokesperson Jim Turner. The bulk of the money -- a $500,000 "Challenge Grant" -- is being awarded to Ryan for use in renovations, staff development and technology acquisitions for the library's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. According to Ryan, the center is one of the world's largest academic entities "specializing in replicating old texts and manuscripts online." The main stipulation of the "Challenge Grant," however, is that the University raise an additional $2 million for the project to supplement the NEH funds. Ryan said he is confident that Penn will have no problem acquiring the needed money. "Now it goes to the development office and they'll work to develop suitable donors," he said. "We have four years to do this and I'm absolutely confident that we will." Adams will receive a $30,000 research fellowship to fund a study entitled "Nature and Nurture in the U.S.S.R.: The Science and Politics of Human Heredity on 20th-Century Russia." Each funding proposal was reviewed by a committee of leading scholars and evaluated according to "originality, and which ones are most likely to make a contribution to the field of humanities," Turner said. The grants awarded to Penn represent only two of the 259 NEH grants totaling $17.2 million that were announced last week. They are being awarded to museums, libraries and universities nationwide primarily to "help keep our cultural institutions strong and creative," according to a statement released by NEH chairperson William Ferris. The National Endowment of Humanities is a federal agency which uses tax dollars to fund humanities-related programs throughout the nation. NEH grants typically help researchers such as Ryan and Adams raise funds from independent groups by substantiating the researchers and their methods. "The grants are almost like a seal of Good Housekeeping," Turner said. "They're an important way by which federal money leverages private money." These two awards are not the first Penn has received from the NEH. The last were awarded in April, when the University was the recipient of four grants, totaling just under $1 million. Ryan said he was thrilled about the award, which represents both an important partnership with the NEH as well as a tremendous honor for his department. "We're really the first institution to work with the NEH to interface between technology and the humanities," he said. "We tried last year and didn't get it. This time we did very, very well."