The National Endowment for the Humanities is going semi-transparent with its grants. Its new Web site allows people to search for recipeints of NEH money by name, by field of inquiry, by date of award, or by institution. Do you want to know who is getting $30,000 to work on a cultural history of Russian food? It is Darra J. Goldstein of Williams College.
Utah Valley State College got $123,456 for a project on “Fostering Coherence in the Humanities through History of Civilization Study.”
The site, called the Funded Projects Query Form, is still a little opaque, however, because it does not provide quick links to the grant recipents and their proposals. Darra J. Goldstein, for instance, requires an Internet search to reveal that she is a professor of Russian at Williams as well as the editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.And searching the NEH Web site for details on Utah Valley State College returned 71 hits, too many to sift through by hand. But the endowment says it welcomes suggestions for improvements; simply email the chief information officer at cio@neh.gov.
