Humanities Endowment Awards $10.7 Million for 288 New Grants
Awards include 58 We the People projects in U.S. history and culture
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced that 288 successful applicants will receive a total of $10.7 million in grants or offers of matching funds for nine faculty initiatives in the humanities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities; 161 fellowships and faculty research awards to individual scholars; and 118 preservation and access grants for research, education and training, or assistance to help cultural institutions protect and preserve their humanities collections.
Of the NEH grants announced today, 58 are designated as We the People projects, a special recognition by the Endowment for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture.
"The humanities convey the story of civilization, and today's NEH grant recipients are deeply engaged in advancing that story through new scholarly research, and they are taking important strides to preserve the material record of our history and culture," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "NEH supports projects that are rigorous, wide-ranging, and substantial in their examination and illumination of the great events and great ideas of the past in our own nation and throughout the world."
In this award cycle, institutions and individual scholars in 43 states and the District of Columbia received support from the NEH; three U.S. scholars working in other nations also received awards. A complete state-by-state listing of grants is available in four Adobe PDF files, located below. The 288 new NEH grants and matching offers come from three of the Endowment's major program areas-education programs, research programs, and preservation and access programs:
Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and Scholars Abroad
- Education program awards include Humanities Initiatives for Faculty, which are intended to strengthen and enrich humanities education and scholarship at the three types of Presidentially-designated institutions: Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. For example, Grambling State University(Grambling, La.) will conduct a month-long summer program for six to eight faculty members and selected participants from neighboring HBCUs to study Homer, Dante, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Shakespeare; the White Earth Tribal and Community College (Mahnomen, Minn.) will establish a digital archive of stories and artifacts from the Anishanaabeg people of Minnesota; and the California State University, Los Angeles, will conduct a year-long project with a four-day symposium to explore current scholarship in migration studies for faculty from CSULA and neighboring Hispanic-serving community colleges.
- Fellowships and Faculty Research Awards support individuals pursuing advanced research in the humanities that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public's understanding of the humanities. Recipients usually produce scholarly articles, monographs on specialized subjects, books on broad topics, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools. Among the recipients of 2007 NEH Fellowships, Mark Cohen (Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.) will conduct research on how Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish rabbi and philosopher, adapted Talmudic law to the social and economic realities of Jewish life in the Islamic world; Paul Werth(University of Nevada, Las Vegas) will examine the influences of Russia's non-Orthodox religions in creating civil order among the empire's diverse population; Dale Cockrell (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.) will compile a scholarly edition of the 125 extant songs and tunes included in the "Little House" books of Laura Ingalls-Wilder; and Jerome Loving (Texas A & M University, Main Campus, College Station) will write a biography of Mark Twain, examining the author's life and work.
- Preservation and Access education and training grants support national or regional (multi-state) education and training programs on the care and management of, and the creation of intellectual access to, library, archival, and material culture collections. New education and training grants include ones made to the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, the Northeast Document Conservation Center (Andover, Mass.), and the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (Philadelphia, Pa.). Research and development grants support projects that advance the nation's capacity to preserve and provide access to humanities resources, with one award made to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maine, Orono. Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-size institutions, such as libraries, museums, and historical societies, archival repositories, town and county records offices, and colleges, improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections. Awards include those made to the museum at Denison University (Granville, Ohio), the University of New Orleans, the Chester County Historical Society (West Chester, Pa.) and the Multnomah County Library (Portland, Ore.).
Programs, total number of projects, and total dollar amounts for grants and matching funds included in this announcement are as follows:
Education Programs (9) $397,407
- Humanities Initiatives at Presidentially Designated Institutions: Historically Black Colleges and Universities (5) $239,705
- Humanities Initiatives at Presidentially Designated Institutions: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (2) $58,255
- Humanities Initiatives at Presidentially Designated Institutions: Tribal Colleges and Universities (2) $99,447
Research Programs (161) $6,088,000
- Fellowships for University Teachers (91) $3,434,000
- Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars (62) $2,368,000
- Faculty Research Awards (6) $224,000
- Fellowships for Advanced Research on Japan (2) $64,000
Preservation and Access (118) $4,059,979; $140,000 in matching offers
- Education and training projects (9) $2,684,928 outright; $100,000 matching funds
- Research and development projects (3) $886,891 outright; $40,000 in matching offers
- Preservation Assistance Grants (106) $488,160
NEH grants are awarded on a competitive basis. Throughout the year, humanities experts outside of the Endowment and members of the National Council on the Humanities consider all applications and advise NEH on the quality and significance of each proposed project.