Honoring Deputy Director Kent Mullikin
News Release Date: October 21, 2011
Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Celebrating its long-time vice president and deputy director, the National Humanities Center (NHC) has announced the establishment of the Kent R. Mullikin Fellowship for scholarship in the humanities. The Mullikin Fellowship will be awarded annually to a distinguished scholar selected by the Center's fellowship selection committee on the merits of his or her research and demonstrated scholarly achievement.
The Fellowship, which honors Dr. Mullikin for his service to the humanities and his remarkable dedication to the Center and its Fellows for over 30 years, has been funded by donations from a group of anonymous philanthropists and matching funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is the second of four new fellowships the Center hopes to endow through its capital campaign, which had its public launch on October 20, 2011.
Educated at Princeton University, Dr. Mullikin received his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served on the staff of the National Humanities Center since its founding in 1976. Since that time, he has worked with five NHC presidents and, as director of the Fellowship Program, has presided over the selection of more than 1,300 scholars for highly-coveted residential fellowships at the world-renowned research institute. Successive classes of Fellows have been impressed not only by Mullikin's personal care and interest but by his ability to recall details about nearly every scholar who has come to work at the Center for the past 34 years. Mullikin has announced that he will retire at the end of the current fellowship year, in June 2012.
"Kent Mullikin's contributions to the National Humanities Center are too numerous to recount," says Geoffrey Harpham, president and director of the Center, "but this fellowship is a fitting tribute to the unflagging effort he has made on behalf of scholars and scholarship in this country. While we will miss his daily presence in the years to come, the Mullikin Fellowship will be a constant reminder of those qualities which he brought to the task—personal devotion, intellectual enthusiasm, and conviviality."
The first recipient of the fellowship will begin work at the Center in the fall of 2012.
About the National Humanities Center
The National Humanities Center, located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, is a private, non-profit institute for advanced study in the humanities. It is the only such institute in the world to be dedicated to the humanities. Since it opened its doors in 1978, the Center has provided residential fellowships to more than 1,300
scholars from all parts of the United States and from three dozen other nations. Up to forty Fellows are chosen annually to pursue their own research and writing and to benefit from the exchange of ideas with colleagues during an academic year at the Center. The Center is also a national leader in humanities education.