Research Triangle Park, N.C. The National Humanities Center has announced the appointment of 40 Fellows for the academic year 2006-07. Representing history, literature, philosophy, and other humanistic fields of study, these scholars will come to the Center from the faculties of 32 colleges and universities across the United States. They will work individually on research projects in the humanities, and will share ideas in seminars, lectures, and conferences.

Geoffrey Harpham, Director of the National Humanities Center, noted that these newly appointed Fellows, the Center's twenty-ninth class, would include the one thousandth Fellow admitted since the Center opened in 1978. "I look forward to welcoming these exciting individuals," he said; "they represent an astonishing range of humanistic learning, from antiquity to the present."

The Center received more than 500 applications in its fellowship competition for 2006-07. In addition to those who succeeded in the competition, the Center's Trustees have invited several distinguished senior Fellows and two leading scholars who will participate in a new initiative on science and the humanities. The appointed Fellows will also include a young scholar who has received a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

The National Humanities Center awards more than $1.4 million in fellowship grants that enable scholars to take leave from their normal academic duties and pursue research at the Center. This funding is made possible by the Center's endowment, by grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by contributions from alumni Fellows of the Center.

The National Humanities Center, located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, is a privately incorporated independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978 the Center has awarded fellowships to leading scholars in the humanities, whose work at the Center has resulted in the publication of more than 900 books in all fields of humanistic study. The Center also sponsors programs to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in secondary and higher education.

» To part 2, 2006-2007 Fellows and Their Projects and Statistics