In what it called a "highly unusual" move, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded coveted fellowships to two Tufts professors from the same department. French literature specialists Gerard Gasarian and Isabelle Naginski from the department of romance languages both received $40,000 fellowship awards for 2002-2003.
"They happen to be both qualified and their work is of a very important nature," NEH media relations spokesman Jim Turner said, adding that the fellowships program is "the NEH's most competitive program - very, very, very competitive."
This year, 1260 people applied for 174 fellowships. MIT and the Universities of Massachusetts - at both Amherst and Boston - also had two professors receive grants this year, and three Harvard professors received fellowships, though no two were from the same academic department.
An NEH grant can be used over the course of an academic year, which is generally about nine months. In some cases, professors will receive financial supplements from their universities so that they can perform research on their regular salary.
Naginski, associate professor and chair of the department of romance languages, received a fellowship for research on the topic "George Sand: Mythographer for the Romantic Age." She specializes in 19th century French prose, Franco-Russian literary relations, and women writers. She received her first NEH grant in 1987.
The professor plans use the next year to produce her second book on George Sand, following the first, entitled George Sand: Writing for Her Life.
"People know about [Sand]," Naginski said. "She dressed as a man, smoked cigars, and had famous lovers... she is infamous but her works are not famous." During her lifetime, Sand wrote over 90 novels, and also produced books of criticism, plays, and autobiographical works."
Naginski said her second book would be more thematically oriented than the first. "I'm going to focus on how [Sand] tried to find myths to recreate a civil society after the French revolution. Sand thinks novels can change the world," Naginski said. "They can create new social models, new relationships between the sexes, and reconciliation between the classes."
Naginski will primarily work out of her home in Concord and will use Harvard's Widener Library and Yale's Sterling Library. "My research feeds into my teaching," Naginski said. She has taught a George Sand seminar in the past, and would like to return to Tufts in the fall of 2003 to lead another. She also hopes to teach a research seminar on 19th-century French literature, based on the University's new French acquisitions.
This spring Naginski will conclude her sixth year as chair of the department of romance languages, a job she describes as "a very, very huge task." Her successor has not yet been chosen.
Gasarian, an associate professor, received an NEH fellowship for his topic "The Forbidden Love of Words in Modern French Poetry." Also a second-time grant recipient, he specializes in 19th and 20th century poetry. With his first grant in 1995, Gasarian produced a book entitled De loin tendrement: Etude sur Baudelaire. This was the first year that he was again eligible to apply, since five years must elapse between fellowships.
Gasarian plans to use his newly awarded fellowship to explore modern poets' relationship to words. "My intuition is that in the Western literary tradition most poets don't feel comfortable admitting that they are attracted to words," Gasarian said.
Ever since the time of Plato, Gasarian said, "We put substance over structure, content over form, and ideas over words... there are movements where poets come out and say, 'I love beauty for beauty's sake and art for art's sake,' but these movements are usually seen as a selfish indulgence."
He said that the socially acceptable reason for writing is "not because you love words, but because you have a passion for issues and ideas, or you need to express emotions," He would like to "show that the tendency to suppress one's attraction to words doesn't disappear, it reemerges in an indirect fashion ... it returns in the guise of words of love, which express a suppressed love of words."
Gasarian described the NEH fellowship as "an honor, but also extremely fruitful on the material level because it allows you to produce a book." He said that a fellowship also improves his teaching.
Naginski said the two NEH fellowships should be "good for the department. We are often seen as difficult and complicated. Now at least it will be known that we do serious research." French professors Vincent Pollina and Brigitte Lane have also received NEH fellowships past years.
The NEH is an independent federal agency that awards grants to support research in the humanities. The fund distributes more money for humanities programs than any other organization in the United States.
