NEH Announces Digital Humanities Challenge Grants and Others

On December 18, the NEH announced $15.7 million in new grant funding. Among the 248 new grants that were announced there are several that will be of great interest to the digital humanities community.

Two of the grants were from our Digital Humanities Challenge Grants program. Challenge Grants are designed to fund infrastructure and long-term institutional support. These grants require the institution to raise matching funds (usually in a ratio of 3 to 1). I’m happy to say that two leading digital humanities centers were recipients of Challenge Grants. They are:

I-CHASS (Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, received a $750,000 Challenge Grant to establish an endowment that will help fund three positions at I-CHASS: an Associate Director for Data Analytics and Pattern Recognition, an Associate Director for Human-Computer Interaction, and an Assistant Director in Modeling.

The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington received a $625,000 Challenge Grant to establish an endowment to fund numerous fellowships, lectures, and tool development. (Read more about this grant).

The NEH also announced a Cooperative Agreement with Ithaka to support several case studies on the long-term sustainability of online academic resources. These case studies will supplement several others being funded by our colleagues at JISC. See this earlier blog post for more information about the original Ithaka/JISC report which inspired these new case studies.

Lastly, the recent NEH announcement also notes the recent grants made for the Humanities High Performance Computing program. There is a nice press release about the programs (with pictures!) over on the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory website.

Congratulations to all the awardees!