NEH announces $33 million in awards and offers for 173 humanities projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today $33 million in grants for 173 humanities projects, including the publication of the complete papers of the first Federal Congress, which met from 1789 to 1791, and the archaeological excavation and analysis of Bronze Age settlements around the Marmara Lake Basin in Anatolia, Turkey.

This funding will support a wide variety of projects including collaborative research, archival conservation programs, the creation of new digital research tools, professional development opportunities for teachers and college faculty, traveling exhibitions, efforts to build long-term support for humanities initiatives at community colleges, and the production and development of films, television, and radio programs.

Among the grants are those that will support the production of a new documentary that uses the brief presidency of James A. Garfield as a lens to explore the numerous political, social, cultural, and scientific issues current in the United States at the time, and help preserve collections of ethnographic and historical materials relating to the four tribes of central Maine, known collectively as the Wabanaki. NEH grants will allow schoolteachers to study the role of civic music such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” in American history and culture and support workshops on making digital humanities scholarship accessible to blind, low-vision, deaf, and hard-of-hearing users. Additional funding will provide for the digitization of historic American newspapers dating from 1836 to 1922 and endow a Virtual Humanities Center at Great Basin College that will allow the two-year college to extend humanities resources and opportunities to rural communities in Nevada.

“The humanities are critical to understanding ourselves and our world,” said NEH Acting Chairman Carole Watson. “Whether it is a compelling documentary or an effort to preserve the collections of important cultural heritage centers, the Endowment is proud to support projects that are accessible to all Americans.”

Institutions and independent scholars in 38 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support. Complete state-by-state listings of grants are available here (35-page PDF).

Grants were awarded in the following categories:

• America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations: Planning and Implementation Grants support museum exhibitions, library-based projects, interpretation of historic places or areas, websites, and other project formats that excite and inform thoughtful reflection upon culture, identity, and history.
• America’s Media Makers: Development and Production Grants support media projects, including radio, television, and digital technology projects that explore significant events, figures, or developments in the humanities. Development grants enable media producers to collaborate with scholars to develop humanities content and to prepare programs for production; production grants support the preparation of a project for presentation to the public.
• Collaborative Research Grants support original research undertaken by a team of two or more scholars or research coordinated by an individual scholar that adds significantly to humanities knowledge or uses the perspectives of the humanities to enhance understanding of science, technology, medicine, and the social sciences.
• Digital Humanities Implementation Grants support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field.
• Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grants provide scholars and advanced graduate students with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities and to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research.
• Landmarks of American History and Culture: Workshops for School Teachers support a series of one-week workshops for K-12 educators that address central themes and topics in American history, government, literature, art history, and other humanities fields related to historic landmarks.
• National Digital Newspaper Program Grants support the creation of a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922, from all states and U.S. territories.
• NEH On the Road Grants help small sites defray the cost of hosting an NEH traveling exhibition.
• Scholarly Editions and Translations Grants enable the preparation of editions and translations of significant literary, philosophical, and historical texts and documents that are currently inaccessible or available in inadequate editions.
• Summer Seminars and Institutes for College and University Teachers Grants support intensive two- to six- week projects in which fifteen to twenty-five college and university faculty members, working with scholarly experts, engage in collegial study of significant texts and topics in the humanities.
• Summer Seminars and Institutes for School Teachers Grants support intensive two- to six-week projects in which fifteen to thirty school teachers, working with scholarly experts, engage in collegial study of significant texts and topics in the humanities.
• Special Initiative: Challenge Grants for Two-year Colleges enable two-year colleges to strengthen their long-term humanities programs and resources and develop curriculum and financial support models that enhance the role of the humanities on community college campuses. 
• Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Grants help cultural institutions meet the complex challenge of preserving large and diverse holdings of humanities materials for future generations by supporting preventative conservation measures to prolong the useful life of collections.