NEH Announces $33.8 Million for 260 Humanities Projects Nationwide

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $33.8 million in grants for 260 humanities projects across the country. Among these are grants to support research for a cultural, political, and legal history of cancer in America that focuses on the Ames test for carcinogens; create a baccalaureate degree program in Native American studies at Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College; and expand the North American Climate History Project, a digital resource of weather and climate records from the colonial and early American Republic period.

“It is my great pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 260 exemplary humanities projects undertaken by scholars, higher education institutions, and organizations of every size,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo).  “This funding will help preserve and expand access to community histories, strengthen the ability of small museums and archives to serve the public, and provide resources and educational opportunities for students to engage with history, literature, languages, and cultures.”

This funding cycle includes the first round of awards made under NEH’s new Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations grant program. Developed as part of the agency’s American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future initiative, these grants assist small and mid-sized cultural organizations—particularly those in underserved communities—in strengthening public humanities programming. Twenty-eight new Public Impact Projects grants will support a range of capacity-building projects at small museums, historical societies, and heritage sites, including development of a new museum interpretive plan on the history of Arthurdale, West Virginia, the nation’s first New Deal community; expansion of the “Invisible Ground” series of heritage markers and audiovisual materials exploring marginalized community histories in southeast Ohio; and an initiative to assist 20 small museums in Oklahoma located along Route 66 in improving their interpretive capacities.

Eighteen new awards under the American Tapestry program, Cultural and Community Resilience grants, will support community-based efforts to preserve cultural heritage in the wake of climate change and COVID-19. Awards in this category include a project to collect oral histories on the impact of the pandemic in Spanish-speaking and Indigenous communities in Kansas; the documentation of Gullah Geechee cultural heritage sites and their histories; the collection and curation of oral histories from Apsáalooke (Crow) elders about the coal economy and Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation over the past fifty years; and documentation of the cultural heritage of Islote, Puerto Rico, a small, historical fishing village endangered by climate change.

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. A project at the Northeast Document Conservation Center will develop open-source software and workflows to preserve recordings stored on Digital Audio Tape (DAT), an especially at-risk format widely used by oral historians, journalists, local radio stations, and other broadcast environments between 1987 and 2005. Additional grants will underwrite a survey of the capacity and unique heritage needs of archives and libraries of over 500 minority-serving institutions across the United States, and a convening of museum professionals and scholars to create data standards and protocols for provenance research on art and artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean to help curb the trade in illegal antiquities.

Several projects apply new technologies and digital methods to innovative humanities public programs and research, such as an interactive documentary website about the 1951 student movement to desegregate Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, led by the sixteen-year-old civil rights activist Barbara Johns, and the development of machine learning techniques to enhance access to large newspaper photograph collections, using the Boston Globe’s historic photo morgue as a test case. Other grants will enable production of a curated narrative website of postcards published and mailed during the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad and help researchers refine large-scale text analysis tools to distinguish paratext from main text in books digitized by the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Thirty new NEH Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants, which leverage federal funds to spur nonfederal support for cultural institutions, will support ADA-compliant improvements to facilities at the Ford Piquette Plant Museum, a National Historic Landmark in Detroit at Henry Ford’s first purpose-built factory, and enable construction of a new learning center to support revitalization of the Keres language and cultural heritage on the Pueblo de Cochiti in New Mexico. Additional funding will help underwrite the new Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in downtown Memphis, support a new museum at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to increase understanding of anti-Semitism, and provide for the replacement of a damaged roof and installation of solar panels at the Meeteetse Museum in Meeteetse, Wyoming.

NEH Humanities Initiatives grants will fund educational resources, programs, curricula, and other projects that enhance teaching and learning in the humanities at 28 two- and four-year colleges and universities. These awards will support: the creation of a cross-disciplinary undergraduate minor in book studies—which encompasses fields such as manuscript studies, book history, design, and the fabrication and conservation of books—at Indiana University Bloomington; a new curriculum at Morgan State University on the history of Black education; a community-based pedagogical project at California State University, Northridge, to transcribe and update materials in the university’s archive documenting the experiences of underrepresented people of color from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; and development of a digital map and course module at Delaware County Community College examining global resistance of Africans and African descendants to segregation and colonialism from 1945 to 1990.

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 biography of Oscar Adams Jr., Alabama’s first African American state supreme court justice; an investigation of how misattributed early modern English texts influenced readers’ tastes and the literary canon; a study of the mining of silver, mercury, and gold in the American West and its connection to the development of American photography; and a digital publication analyzing the architecture, material culture, and social history of the Ponte residential complex in Johannesburg, South Africa, during and after apartheid.

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.

30 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.

18 grants, totaling $2.6 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).  

15 grants, totaling $2.1 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.  

10 grants, totaling $1.1 million

Fellowships

Support advanced research in the humanities by college and university teachers and independent scholars.

82 grants, totaling $4.7 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 $155,000

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. 

28 grants, totaling $4.1 million

Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants 

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

30 grants, totaling $12.3 million

Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants   

Support projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources.  

7 grants, totaling $1.5 million

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.  

9 grants, totaling $3.1 million

Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations Grants

Support America’s small and mid-sized cultural organizations, especially those from underserved communities, in enhancing their interpretive strategies and strengthening their public humanities programming.

28 grants, totaling $677,664

 

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.