This year the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a new program for public humanities scholars. As per the NEH website:
These are the first awards made under NEH’s new Public Scholar grant program, which was created in December 2014 as part of The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, an agency-wide initiative that seeks to bring humanities into the public square and foster innovative ways to make scholarship relevant to contemporary life.
The Public Scholar Program builds upon NEH’s 50-year tradition of supporting the publication of nonfiction works that have profoundly influenced the way we understand history, politics, literature, and society. The Public Scholar awards support books that use deep research to open up important or appealing subjects for wider audiences by presenting significant humanities topics in a way that is accessible to general readers.
There were almost 5oo applications for the new program, and only 36 were successful. Of these, two are Wesleyan faculty!
Andrew Curran, the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, has taught in the Romance Languages department and just finished a stint as Dean of Arts and Humanities. He is writing an intellectual biography of Denis Diderot, the French philosophe long overshadowed by Voltaire and Rousseau. When Andy’s book comes out, that will surely change, as he shows how relevant and provocative Diderot’s ideas remain.
Jennifer Tucker has taught in the history, FGSS, and SISP programs, and not long ago was running the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. Jennifer has long been interested in the intersection of visual culture and science, and her project on the emergence of facial recognition system technology will have broad impact. Jennifer expects to write a wide-ranging account of how the project of capturing the defining features of an individual face has led to current modes of surveillance and law enforcement, digital privacy and individuality.
I have many reasons to be proud of our faculty’s accomplishments, and I am a big fan of these particular projects. And, of course: THIS IS WHY.