BY DIANE MANUEL
"Welcome to my monster," Meg Worley said as colleagues polished off slabs of homemade apple pie at the Thursday lunch that is a tradition at the Humanities Center.
Worley, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature, was describing for fellow scholars the project she will be pursuing at the center this year -- an ambitious dissertation that will examine the collaborations of translators working in five different locations and six languages during a 700-year period of the Middle Ages.
Her informal and occasionally irreverent talk, "A Little Vernacularity and a Lot of Translation," found an appreciative audience and suggested that Worley has a promising future, as either a medievalist or stand-up comic.
Worley is one of 12 graduate students at the center who are the first cohort to benefit from a 1996 challenge grant of $625,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant has allowed the center to establish a permanent financial basis for its external fellowship program and also has enabled it to increase the number of awards offered to graduate students.
Founded in 1980, the center was one of the first campus-based research institutes in the United States. It promotes humanistic research with one-year residential fellowships, public presentations and research workshops.
Music, history, comparative literature, English, art history, religious studies, classics, Asian languages, philosophy -- the fields represented by eight external fellows and eight Stanford faculty members cut a colorful swath across the spectrum of the humanities. The fact that more than 300 applications were received for this year's slots indicates that scholars increasingly are eager to participate in the interdisciplinary give-and-take that distinguishes the center's workshops and discussions.
After finishing her talk at the Oct. 21 lunch and opening the floor for questions, Worley may have been speaking for many other scholars in the room when she noted that "it's good to talk with people who are not in history, who are not medievalists."
"I'm looking for your help with this," she added.
For the next half-hour Worley's colleagues proffered intellectually stimulating support, asking pertinent questions and suggesting thematic links she might pursue.
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, associate professor of French and comparative literature, is spending her fellowship year at the center writing a book that will integrate missionaries' and travelers' accounts with historical and sociopolitical analyses of Francophone literature from Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. She was curious about translations that might have been done in the Middle Ages by monks, situated as they were in "places of knowledge."
Sarah Burns, a professor of art from Indiana University who is working on a study of the Gothic "underbelly" of American art history of the 19th century, wanted to know how collaborative groups of translators in the Middle Ages compared with contemporary notions of authorship.
The only other medievalist in the room, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, referred to the fact that patrons in the Middle Ages often were given credit for the achievements of those, like translators, who worked for them.
"In architecture, Abbot Suger is always credited with 'building' St. Denis," Katherine Tachau said. "But I doubt that he ever lifted a stone."
"Excellent point," Worley responded. "I've got to give that some thought."
Cross-disciplinary exchanges are at the heart of the Humanities Center, and applications are being accepted through Dec. 15 for a new "shared research" fellowship program that will be launched in the 2000-01 academic year.
"The idea is to bring to the center each year a group of two senior faculty fellows and two postdoctoral fellows who will engage in shared research leading either to a co-authored book or articles, or to separate studies on interrelated topics," says Keith Baker, director of the center.
"One of the principal benefits of the program is that it will add representatives of a relatively rare species in the humanities -- postdoctoral fellows -- to the center's traditional mix of graduate student, junior faculty and senior faculty fellows."
Shared research projects might include separate studies of closely related topics or a collaboratively written book. While preference for the faculty fellowships will be given to proposals from established scholars at Stanford or other institutions who are in positions to foster the work of postdoctoral fellows, the faculty members will be discouraged from nominating their own former graduate students. The faculty fellowship awards will be announced in early March 2000, and the postdoctoral fellowships will be awarded in June.
The fellowship programs are designed for research in the humanities, which are defined in the legislation that established the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities to "include, but are not limited to, the following fields: history, philosophy, languages, literature, linguistics, archaeology, jurisprudence, history and criticism of the arts, ethics, comparative religion, and those aspects of the social sciences employing historical or philosophical approaches. This last category includes cultural anthropology, sociology, political theory, international relations and other subjects concerned with questions of value."
In addition to the fellowship initiatives, the center will add a number of new discussion groups to its roster of continuing research workshops. The philosophical reading group has been meeting weekly for the past 12 years, and new workshops will meet on ancient societies, empire and cultures, film studies and opera studies.
In May, the center also will bring
four poets from Ireland to join poet Eavan Boland, professor of
English, for "A Day of Irish Poetry." The daylong program will
feature Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Desmond O'Grady, Michael Longley
and Paula Meehan reading from their own works and discussing
"poetry and the new Ireland." SR