In a move that earned him a standing ovation from the Faculty Senate at the end of last quarter, President Hennessy announced a new pilot program to give all tenured and tenure-track humanities faculty $5,000 yearly grants to cover research costs.

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Michael Ramm

Tenured and tenure-track members of the Stanford Humanities Center and other departments will receive $5,000 grants to pay for research trips, conferences and copyrights. Over 200 profs. will receive money.

“Faculty in other areas have access to outside grants, but in the humanities that’s not the case,” said Stephanie Kalfayan, vice provost for academic affairs. “President Hennessy wanted to make it possible for faculty to travel to conferences, conduct fieldwork, and visit archives without worrying about the cost.”

While faculty in the sciences can and often do receive research funding from sources outside the University, humanities professors are often left footing their own bills. President Hennessy’s move — hailed by Kalfayan as “really unprecedented” — was a welcome gift for many professors.

“The President’s marvelous support for research in the humanities opens fresh opportunities for Stanford’s outstanding faculty to bring new ideas to students and to the public,” said History Prof. John Bender, director of the Stanford Humanities Center.

While Columbia University provides its humanities faculty with $1,750 stipends, funding of any kind is uncommon in the humanities departments of most universities, and Stanford’s base of $5,000 is novel.

With 15 departments in the humanities and over 200 tenured or tenure-track professors, the grants are certain to fund a wide range of research on topics ranging from ancient Rome to electronic music.

Italian Prof. Carolyn Springer, who recently published her research on Italian Renaissance armor, traveled from Rome to Madrid for her studies — no cheap trip, especially with the current Euro exchange rate.

Springer called the new funding “very welcome indeed,” and said she had no doubt that it would be well spent. She said she plans to use her own grant to attend international conferences — important research opportunities with expenses that she has sometimes paid out of pocket in the past.

In the English Department, Dr. Sianne Ngai, a professor of American literature, said that her work with twentieth-century literature lends itself to more theoretical writing and doesn’t require much travel to foreign archives.

Speaking on behalf of her colleagues, though, she said it can be a serious financial burden to visit Russian archives or to gain access to literary estates.

“It is true that professors in the humanities are usually faced with greater challenges for finding funding than their colleagues in the sciences,” she said. “You’d be surprised how expensive it is to quote poems in your works!”