The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced Nathan Vedal, assistant professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as one of the recipients of its Summer Stipend grants. This grant program sees an average of 874 applications in its nationwide competition and funds only 9% of them.
Summer Stipends support continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months. Because NEH requires all applicants to be nominated by their universities, the Center for the Humanities coordinates an internal competition for Washington University to select the university's two nominees.
The grant will support research for Vedal’s project, “The Category of Everything: Ordering and Circulating Knowledge in Early Modern China,” which he will eventually publish as a book on the organization of knowledge in 16th- to 18th-century China, based on an analysis of reference works such as encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Vedal also was recently awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Vedal participated in a Proposal-Writing Workshop organized by the humanities center early in the fall semester to hone his fellowship applications prior to submitting them.
The next deadline for the NEH Summer Stipend Internal Competition is August 28, 2020. In advance of that date, the Center for the Humanities will host a Proposal-Writing Workshop for faculty and post-docs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who plan to apply for any external funding in fall 2020 or spring 2021, as well as a Scholarly Writing Retreat, May 18-29.
Details on the NEH’s other awards made in April can be found here: $22.2 Million for 224 Humanities Projects Nationwide.
