Kenyon Home » Office of the Provost » Awards » NEH Professorship

NEH Professorship

Professor Vernon Schubel, is the new National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Schubel's project will be to develop a liberal arts model for the integrated study of Islamic civilization.

A Brief History and Description of the NEH Professorship

The NEH professorship honors a member of the College's humanities faculty who has displayed excellence in teaching and has developed a compelling vision of how the professorship would enhance the study of the humanities at Kenyon. (We interpret the "humanities" as broadly as NEH does -- that is, as encompassing not only the disciplines in our own Humanities Division but also all other disciplines that examine historical, literary, and philosophical questions about the human condition.) The NEH professorship is awarded through a competitive process that involves submission of a proposal to a selection committee.

The professorship is funded by the earnings from an endowment created by a grant from NEH and gifts from friends of Kenyon. Each incumbent usually holds the position for a term of three years. The professorship offers:

  1. A reduction in teaching commitments.
  2. An opportunity to use the time thereby gained for a project that serves education in the humanities at the College and might consist of activities of the following sorts:
    1. Lecturing on and writing about the humanities.
    2. Organizing symposia or workshops that encourage reflection about the humanities.
    3. Assisting faculty colleagues in their teaching.
    4. Devising innovative new courses. (Please note: These examples are illustrative; nominations will be assessed in part by the vision of the project that the candidate presents.)
  3. An annual salary bonus for the term of the professorship.
  4. A modest program budget.

Under the rubric of this program Howard Sacks developed the Family Farm Project; Peter Rutkoff and Will Scott developed the Great Migration Project. George McCarthy's project, entitled Democracy and Social Justice: Ancient and Modern, has resulted in two books that connected directly with courses in which students explored the links between modern social theory and the ideas of the ancients. Wendy Singer's (the fourth NEH Professor) project was entitled "Migration, Diaspora, and Globalism."