Two Dartmouth professors were among 180 scholars who will receive research stipends from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded its annual prestigious fellowships on Tuesday.
Philosophy professor Julia Driver and Anthropology professor John Watanabe were the only recipients in New Hampshire.
The NEH is an independent federal grant provider that funds programs supporting the Humanities in education, exhibitions, libraries and other public arenas.
It received 1,289 applications this year and awarded 180 fellowships and $3.3 million in funds.
Each professor will receive a stipend of $40,000 for a 9-12 month fellowship and will spend the year doing research rather than teaching, in accordance with the rules governing NEH fellowships.
Driver and Watanabe are both using their fellowships to finish authoring books.
Driver's book addresses the "greatest happiness" principle, while Watanabe's focuses on administering race, class, community and nation in 19th Century Guatemala.
Both said they were pleased to have received the awards.
"It's a real honor to get it," Driver said.
Watanabe said he views the grant as an opportunity to round out his abilities as a professor.
"This reaffirms my faith in the fact that to be a good teacher you have to do your research too," Watanabe said. "I really see doing this kind of research is important to being a good teacher, and hopefully it will make me a more interesting one as well.
"When you're teaching, you have to make a lot of generalizations, and after a while you begin believing them," he continued. "Research is a good reminder of how we need to be careful with all the details," Watanabe said.
Watanabe has been researching material for his book for over five years.
Driver has been working on her project for over a year and a half and predicts that she will finish her book within a year. Her previous book focused on a similar topic, but from a different perspective. In "Uneasy Virtue," she challenged Aristotle's theory of virtue.
Both professors also had applied for fellowships and grants from Dartmouth.
Receiving an NEH fellowship automatically disqualifies them from any internal funding. The funds they could have been awarded from the College will instead be given to other faculty.
$640,000 has also been awarded in Faculty Research Awards to 19 scholars at historically Black, Hispanic-serving, and tribal colleges and universities.
