NEH Announces $33.17 Million for 245 Humanities Projects Nationwide

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $33.17 million in grants for 245 humanities projects across the country. These grants include support for work on a new museum at the University at Buffalo to house the world’s largest collection of materials by and about James Joyce, and enable production by the Center for Independent Documentary of a documentary examining the history and legacy of the landmark Eyes on the Prize public television series on the civil rights movement, first broadcast in 1987.

“NEH is proud to support these exemplary education, media, preservation, research, and infrastructure projects,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “These 245 projects will expand the horizons of our knowledge of culture and history, lift up humanities organizations working to preserve and tell the stories of local and global communities, and bring high-quality public programs and educational resources directly to the American public.”

This funding cycle includes 23 new NEH Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants, which leverage federal funds to spur nonfederal support for cultural institutions. Among these are awards to upgrade the digital infrastructure of Hawai’i’s Bishop Museum to improve access to digitized collections documenting Hawaiian and Pacific history and culture; stabilize and repair Pittsburgh’s Carrie Blast Furnaces site, one of the last surviving landmarks of the city’s preeminent role in the twentieth-century steel industry; and create outdoor classroom spaces for education programs on Lakota cultural traditions at the Pine Ridge Reservation’s Oglala Lakota Artspace in South Dakota.

Several grants awarded today will help preserve and expand public access to important historical and cultural collections, including a project at the New-York Historical Society to digitize wire reports from Time-Life News Service correspondents from 1930 to 1960, giving access to raw reportage on major events of the twentieth century such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Other grants will support the development of protocols at the College of Saint Benedict in collaboration with tribal communities, for digitizing and sharing records related to Native American boarding schools and make available online videos of performances, master classes, lectures, and oral histories from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from 1992 through 2010. A “Mapping Chicagoland” project led by the University of Chicago will digitize, georeference, and make accessible online a collection of more than 4,000 maps of the city published before 1940.

Other funding will support the creation of media, exhibitions, and public programs that bring the insights of the humanities to wide audiences. These include grants to produce the first major documentary on Caribbean-American writer Jamaica Kincaid by Women Make Movies; a film by UnionDocs tracing the evolution of First Amendment law in the 50 years since attorney Floyd Abrams represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case; and a documentary by the Fort Ross Conservancy about the Kashia-Pomo, a displaced Native Californian tribe, and their efforts to recover ancestral lands along the California coast. NEH Public Humanities Projects grants will fund a traveling exhibition that tells the story of Ethiopian art from antiquity to the present at the Walters Art Museum, underwrite a new permanent exhibition at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum that guides visitors through the tenement home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, an African-American couple who lived in Lower Manhattan in the 1860s, and bring the American Library Association’s “Great Stories Club” reading and discussion program for underserved youth to 100 small libraries across the country.

Education grants for curriculum innovation in the humanities and interdisciplinary partnerships between humanities and non-humanities fields of study will fund an integrated ethics curriculum project at Salisbury University led by faculty in the university’s philosophy, psychology, and biology departments. Other projects include the creation of a minor in business humanities at Seton Hall University; development of an undergraduate certificate program in civics literacy and civic engagement at the University of Northern Iowa; and implementation of a health humanities certificate program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

New NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War grants will support a veterans discussion program led by the Chinese Historical Society in the San Francisco Bay area on the experiences of Chinese-American veterans in wars from WWII to the present, and a project at Bowie State University to train ROTC cadets and student veterans to lead a discussion series for local veterans exploring themes of service, sacrifice, and reintegration in relation to the Civil War and Vietnam War.

Awards made through NEH’s Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research grant program will support archaeological investigation by researchers at the University of Illinois of shrines and sweat lodges dating from 1050 AD at the ancient Native American center of Cahokia outside modern-day Saint Louis and an archaeological and ethnohistorical study by the University of Louisville of over-burying practices at the historic Eastern Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.

NEH Summer Stipends for scholars will enable archival research for more than 100 publications, including books on topics such as portrayals of libel on the English stage in the 1590s, newly discovered charcoal graffiti at Pompeii, and how Victoria-era fascination with the “lost orchid” led to the rise of middle-class consumerism and collecting.

Eight NEH Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions grants will fund fellowships for humanities scholars at libraries, museums, and centers for advanced study such as the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, New-York Historical Society, American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Linda Hall Library Foundation.

And seven new NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grants, administered in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), will fund research, fieldwork, and the preparation of linguistic resources that document languages at risk of extinction. Among these are an award to the Fort Sill Apache Tribe to restore, transcribe, translate, and conduct linguistic analysis of the critically endangered Chihene Apache dialect, captured in archival recordings of Apache prisoners of war seized with Geronimo in 1886, and a researcher fellowship to document the Meskwaki language as it is spoken today by tribal members in central Iowa.

A full list of grants by geographic location is available here.

Grants were awarded in the following categories:

 

Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research  
 

Support institutionally based empirical field research that uses archaeological or ethnographic methods to answer significant questions in the humanities.

6 grants, totaling $774,683

Dialogues on the Experience of War

Support the study and discussion of important humanities sources about war and military service.

5 grants, totaling $482,020

Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowships and Senior Research Grants  

Joint initiative between NEH and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support fieldwork and other activities relevant to recording, documenting, and archiving endangered languages, as well as the preparation of transcriptions, databases, grammars, and lexicons of languages that are in danger of being lost.

7 grants, totaling $1 million

Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

Provide scholars with research time and access to resources beyond what is available at their home institutions.

8 grants, totaling $1.69 million

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants

Allow institutions to preserve, and provide access to, collections essential to scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities.

36 grants, totaling $8.87 million

Humanities Connections

Expand the role of the humanities in the undergraduate curriculum at two- and four-year institutions.

28 grants, totaling $2.11 million

Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants

Leverage federal funding to strengthen and sustain humanities infrastructure and capacity-building activities at cultural institutions.

23 grants, totaling $11 million

Media Projects: Development and Production Grants

Support the preparation of media programs, including radio, podcasts, television, and long-form documentary films, for distribution.

13 grants, totaling $3.75 million

Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions 

Support permanent, temporary single-site, and multi-venue traveling humanities exhibitions.

9 grants, totaling $1.56 million

Public Humanities Projects: Historic Places

Support the interpretation of historical sites, houses, neighborhoods, and regions.

4 grants, totaling $590,000

Public Humanities Projects: Humanities Discussions

Support one- to two-year-long series of community-wide public programs that are centered on one or more significant humanities resources, such as historical artifacts, artworks, literature, musical composition, or films. 

2 grants, totaling $463,546

Short Documentaries

Support production and distribution of documentary films up to 30 minutes that engage audiences with humanities ideas.

1 grant, totaling $149,996

Summer Stipends 

Support full-time work by a scholar on a humanities project for a period of two months.

103 grants, totaling $618,000

 

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 www.neh.gov.