NEH Announces $22.6 Million for 219 Humanities Projects Nationwide
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $22.6 million in grants for 219 humanities projects across the country. Among these are grants that will establish protocols for the stewardship and voluntary return of unethically acquired archaeological and ethnographic artifacts to their communities of origin; enrich K–12 educators’ understanding and teaching of the American Revolution through workshops at lesser-known historic sites around Boston; and produce an immersive virtual replica of the former Mount Pleasant Industrial Indian Boarding School, a boarding school established in Michigan by the U.S. government in 1893 to forcibly assimilate Native American children.
“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”
Several grants awarded during this funding cycle support small and mid-sized cultural institutions that serve as keepers of community history and culture in developing new interpretive materials for public tours and exhibitions, and in gathering oral histories and materials documenting local history. Twenty-seven small museums, historical societies, and heritage sites will receive NEH Public Impact Project grants for capacity-building projects that include a partnership among six historical organizations to present the history of the Underground Railroad in New Jersey; development of new interpretive plans for San Francisco’s Angel Island, the largest immigration station on the West Coast; and new resources on the history of Black Appalachians in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. Additional funding will support a rapid response community archivist program in Wisconsin to help Native communities address urgent archival and collections management projects to mitigate the loss of culturally significant knowledge.
Grants awarded today also make significant investments in the fields of conservation science research and training to help find better ways to preserve materials and collections of critical importance to the nation’s cultural heritage. New funding will create a program at the University of North Florida to prepare undergraduates for careers in collections care through hands-on training at local Florida historical organizations and help undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Arizona learn best practices for archival management and analysis specific to heritage collections from the American Southwest. It will also support new training programs at Rochester Institute of Technology for scholars and library, archive, and museum professionals in using multispectral imaging to uncover hidden elements and information about cultural heritage materials.
NEH Humanities Initiatives grants will fund educational resources, programs, curricula, and other projects that enhance teaching and learning in the humanities at two- and four-year colleges and universities. These awards will support a “debate across the curriculum” project at the University of Utah to incorporate training in debating skills, reasoning, and argumentation into undergraduate humanities courses; a curriculum at West Virginia University focusing on the social, ethical, and technical aspects of artificial intelligence (AI); new minor and certificate programs in museums, archives, and gallery studies at Saint Regis University in Denver; and a student digital humanities project at Tarrant County College using geospatial technology to record the oral, architectural, and national history of Fort Worth’s North Side neighborhood to create an accessible local history archive and educational resource.
Several projects apply new technologies and digital methods to innovative humanities public programs and research, such as development of an immersive virtual reality (VR) game that explores the history of ancient Peru and teaches users about the archaeological methods that shed light on ancient Andean culture. Other grants will allow Shakespeare scholars and developers at the University of Idaho to create a free web-based tool for use in high school and college classrooms that will gather, preserve, and publish important dramaturgical information such as script annotations, interpretive essays, and glossaries. And they will support work by researchers at Wichita State University on a digital application to convert multimodal texts that include images and graphics into fully accessible versions for blind and low-vision users.
Newly awarded NEH Fellowships and Awards for Faculty will support advanced research and writing projects by humanities scholars on a wide range of subjects. Funded projects include a military history of the United Nations’s twentieth-century peacekeeping operations; a critical edition of the first known cookbook in the English language, The Forme of Cury, published circa 1390; an anthology of Lakota and Dakota literature in translation; and a book on the builders, craftsmen, laborers, and artisans who constructed Renaissance Rome’s architectural masterpieces.
This funding cycle also includes a cooperative agreement between NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to hold a national convening to evaluate the current state of humanities graduate education and make recommendations for graduate programs that prepare students for a variety of humanities-related careers. This three-year project will examine aspects of current graduate programs such as admissions, recruitment, advising and retention of graduate students, graduate student labor, curricular innovation, and preparation for both academic and non-academic careers, with a view to creating significant and long-lasting change within graduate education in the humanities.
A full list of grants by geographic location is available here.
In addition to these direct grant awards, NEH provides operating support to the agency’s humanities council partners, which make NEH-funded grants throughout the year in every U.S. state and territory.
Grants were awarded in the following categories:
Awards for Faculty
| Support advanced research in the humanities by scholars, teachers, and staff at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities 28 grants, totaling $1.5 million |
| Cultural and Community Resilience Grants | Support community-based efforts to mitigate climate change and COVID-19 pandemic impacts, safeguard cultural resources, and foster cultural resilience through identifying, documenting, or collecting cultural heritage and community experience 17 grants, totaling $2.5 million |
| Digital Humanities Advancement Grants | Support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. Digital Humanities Advancement Grants receive partial funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) 13 grants, totaling $2.6 million |
| Digital Projects for the Public Grants | Support projects such as websites, mobile applications, games, and virtual environments that significantly contribute to the public’s engagement with humanities ideas 11 grants, totaling $1.9 million |
| Fellowships | Support advanced research in the humanities by college and university teachers and independent scholars 78 grants, totaling $4.4 million |
| NEH-JUSFC Fellowships for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan | A joint activity of the Japan–United States Friendship Commission (JUSFC) and NEH. Awards support research on modern Japanese society and political economy, Japan’s international relations, and U.S.–Japan relations 3 grants, totaling $180,000 |
Humanities Initiatives Grants
| Strengthen the teaching and study of the humanities in higher education through the development or enhancement of humanities programs, courses, and resources. Grant programs are offered for colleges and universities, community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities 26 grants, totaling $3.8 million |
| Landmarks of American History and Culture | Support workshops for K–12 educators that enhance and strengthen humanities teaching, focused on using particular places or communities to understand American history and culture 1 grant, totaling $189,708 |
| Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants | Support projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources |
| Preservation and Access Education and Training Grants | Help the staff of cultural institutions obtain the knowledge and skills needed to serve as effective stewards of humanities collections. Grants also support educational programs that prepare the next generation of conservators and preservation professionals, as well as projects that introduce the staff of cultural institutions to recent improvements in preservation and access practices 8 grants, totaling $2.8 million |
| Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations Grants | Supports America’s small and mid-sized cultural organizations, especially those from underserved communities, in enhancing their interpretive strategies and strengthening their public humanities programming 27 grants, totaling $662,297 |
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): 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 www.neh.gov