NEH Announces Fellowships Open Book Awards

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded twelve new fellowships to university presses to publish free ebooks of recent scholarly publications, the first awards under NEH’s Fellowships Open Book Program.

NEH’s Fellowships Open Book Program, administered by the agency’s Division of Research Programs and Office of Digital Humanities, is a special initiative for scholarly presses to make recent NEH-supported books and monographs freely available for scholars, students, and the public.

The first round of Open Book fellowships will support ebook publication of titles on literature, history, musicology, and sociology, all written with support from NEH fellowship programs.

“The current pandemic has heightened the need for scholars to be able to conduct serious research remotely,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “The digital editions made possible by these new awards will make superb NEH-funded works freely available to readers across the globe.”

NEH Fellowship Open Book Program recipients will receive $5,500 per book to support digitization, marketing, and a stipend for the author.

NEH is currently accepting applications for the second round of the Fellowships Open Book Program. The next deadline is August 17, 2020. To learn more or apply, see the Notice of Funding Opportunity.

Below are the new NEH Fellowship Open Book awardees:

Duke University Press

Max M. Ward, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, 2019. [Original research funded by award FO-232742-16]

David F. Garcia, Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins, 2017. [Original research funded by award FA-57676-14]

Indiana University Press

Martin L. Johnson, Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States, 2018. [Original research funded by award FA-58514-15]

Johns Hopkins University Press

Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism, 2018. [Original research funded by award FA-56408-12]

Jason R. Rudy, Imagined Homeland: British Poetry in the Colonies, 2017. [Original research funded by award FA-54989-10]

The University of Chicago Press

Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, 2017. [Original research funded by award FA-55761-11]

Kenda Mutongi, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi, 2017. [Original research funded by award FB-56100-12]

Kristine C. Harper, Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America, 2017. [Original research funded by award FB-53252-07]

University of Illinois Press

Jewel A. Smith, Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries, 2019. [Original research funded by award FA-53416-07]

University of Michigan Press

Jonathan W. Stone, Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of Folksong in the 1930s, forthcoming. [Original research funded by award FEL-258129-18]

University of Minnesota Press

Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste: Echoes of Little Gidding, forthcoming. [Original research funded by award FEL-263057-19]

Vanderbilt University Press

Luis Martin-Estudillo, The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe & Its Critics in Spanish Culture, 2018. [Original research funded by award FA-58154-15]

National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at neh.gov.