Funding: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Announces $37.5 Million for 240 Humanities Projects Nationwide Including First Round of Grants For New Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence Program

From NEH:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $37.5 million in grants for 240 humanities projects across the country. These grants will support a feature-length documentary on the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the first female pilots to fly for the U.S. military in World War II, and their fight for recognition as veterans after the war; a new book on the history of the travel souvenir; and the refinement of remote sensing methods for conducting noninvasive surveys and analysis of buried archaeological sites of Indigenous settlements in the U.S.

This round of funding, NEH’s third and last for fiscal year 2024, will support vital humanities education, research, preservation, and public programs. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $65 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and jurisdictional humanities councils.

“From exhibitions, books, and documentaries about our past, to research centers to help us meet the challenges of the future, these 240 new humanities projects contribute to our greater understanding of the human endeavor and add to our nation’s wealth of educational and cultural resources,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “We look forward to the exciting range of products, discoveries, tools, and programs these grants will generate at institutions and in communities across the United States.”

A full list of the 240 new awards by geographic location is available here.

Artificial Intelligence

This funding cycle includes the first round of grants awarded through NEH’s new Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence program, which supports the creation of humanities-based centers focusing on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI. The program, part of NEH’s ongoing research initiative, Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, which supports humanities projects that explore the impacts of AI-related technologies on truth, trust, and democracy; safety and security; and privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. Five colleges and universities in California, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Virginia received the first grants in this program to create new hubs of scholarship and learning that will provide a more holistic understanding of AI in the modern world. Read more about these awards.

History, Language, and More

Grants awarded in a number of categories will support advanced research on topics in history, literature, law, ethics, art history, philosophy, and languages, and foster innovative new tools, digital methods, and infrastructure that will enhance scholarly research, teaching and public programming in the humanities. Newly funded Collaborative Research projects include DNA analysis of parchment manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harvard University Law Library, and the Norfolk Record Office to better understand early modern parchment-making practices, explore the history of cattle, goat, and sheep breed selection, and trace the emergence of pathogens in early modern England. Additional awards will fund a convening of international scholars to create an edited volume and digital platform on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls as a rich source of information on Jewish history and the imperial cultures of the ancient Near East.

New Digital Humanities Advancement Grants will develop methods for computational analysis of Yiddish language and literature as a test case for applying natural language processing to texts in languages with a limited corpus of digitized materials. And they will support the creation of a virtual model of a house and garden from the ancient city of Pompeii, based on information gathered from archaeological excavation, laser scanning, and 3D-GIS, to investigate the ways individuals from a diversity of genders, ages, and social statuses would have used these spaces.

Projects focusing on the documentation of endangered languages will develop a community-based model for everyday communication styles and social interactions in the Diné and Lakota languages, and collect oral histories and personal narratives of the remaining 27 speakers of Umóⁿhoⁿ (Omaha) in Nebraska and Iowa for inclusion in a digital archive for use by Tribal members, scholars, and language revitalization experts and educators.

Projects for Public Audiences

Other funding will support public humanities projects such as films, exhibitions, podcasts, and community discussion programs that bring humanities ideas and experiences to large public audiences. Grants will support “The Declaration’s Journey,” an exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States, and an exhibition at the Burke Museum on the cultural and political significance of traditional wool regalia common to the nineteenth-century Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

Funding for media projects will help underwrite a new season of the public television series Poetry in America and enable production of a documentary, “Diamond Diplomacy,” exploring the history of how baseball has facilitated decades of social, cultural, and political exchanges between the United States and Japan. Grants for podcast projects will support Audio Timecapsule, a new podcast series by Jad Abumrad spotlighting important moments in American radio history, and the first season of a podcast series from the Seneca Nation of Indians Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center exploring the history, language, and culture of the people of the Seneca Nation, the Haudenosaunee, and other Tribal communities.

NEH Public Scholars grants, which support popular nonfiction books in the humanities, will enable publication of 25 new titles, including a biography of the Chinese American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu—often called the “Chinese Marie Curie”—who was passed over for a Nobel Prize in 1957 in favor of her male colleagues, and a book about the dramatic life of Warder Cresson, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker and first American diplomat to Jerusalem, who was tried for insanity after his conversion to Judaism in the 1840s. Other book projects will tell the story of the making of George Cukor’s 1939 movie The Women, the first Hollywood film to feature an all-female cast; and examine the history of the Imperial Sugar Company and its connections to the city of Sugar Land and the Texas Penitentiary System.

New awards for scholarly editions and translations will support collaborative teams of scholars in producing critical editions of the collected papers of figures such as Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, George Washington, James Madison, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They will also underwrite a definitive English translation and edition of the Tlalamatl Cuaxicala, a 16th-century Mesoamerican pictographic text documenting land rights and their rearrangement following the Aztec invasion of central Mexico and enable the publication of five volumes of translations of modern Ukrainian literature. National Digital Newspaper Program grants awarded in nine states will support the ongoing digitization of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 for inclusion in the Chronicling Americaonline database of historic American newspapers.

Education Resources and Collections Care

Forty-five grants for summer institutes and workshops will provide professional enrichment and research opportunities for K–12 schoolteachers and college faculty on topics such as Asian immigration to the United States through the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay; archaeological study of the culture and history of the ancient Fremont people in southern Utah; the history of the slave ship Clotilda and Africatown community in Mobile, Alabama; and an interdisciplinary study of tuberculosis, yellow fever, typhoid and other pandemics and public health crises in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Several newly funded projects will help preserve and expand access to important historical and cultural collections, such as upgrades to the Detroit Institute of Arts’ fire suppression and warning systems to protect the museum’s extensive collection of over 39,000 works of art, prints, drawings, and photographs; and the replacement of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s HVAC system to provide a stable and sustainable environment for cultural anthropology, fine arts, and rare books collections that include materials relating to the discovery of the early hominid “Lucy,” photographs documenting Indigenous community life in South America in the 1940s by solo traveler Bernice Goetz, and rare works by John James Audubon, John Gould, and Edward Curtis.

NEH Preservation Assistance Grants will help 57 small and mid-sized museums, libraries, historical societies, and archival repositories improve their ability to care for significant humanities collections. Among these are grants to: the Bishop Museum to regulate humidity levels within the Victorian-era koa wood cases exhibiting the museum’s Hawaiian and Pacific cultural and ethnographic collections; to the Pearl S. Buck House for conservation of the writer’s personal collection and scrapbooks related to her founding of the international Welcome House Adoption Agency; and to the Motown Museum for an environmental monitoring system to preserve the corporate records, photographs, films, and memorabilia from Motown Records documenting the history of Motown music and its connections to the Civil Rights Movement.

NEH awarded grants in the following categories:

• Collaborative Research: Support interpretive research undertaken by a team of two or more collaborating scholars that adds significantly to knowledge and understanding of the humanities. 19 grants, totaling $2.78 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. 14 grants, totaling $2.53 million
• Dynamic Language Infrastructure — Documenting Endangered Languages Senior Research Grants: Joint initiative between NEH and the National Science Foundation 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. 2 grants, totaling $898,428
• Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence: Support the creation of new humanities research centers on artificial intelligence focused on exploring the ethical, legal, or societal implications of AI. 5 grants, totaling $2.72 million
• Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities: 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. 4 grants, totaling $963,499
• Institutes for Higher Education Faculty: Support intensive one- to four-week projects in which sixteen to twenty-five college and university faculty members, working with scholarly experts, engage in collegial study of significant texts and topics in the humanities. 10 grants, totaling $1.84 million
• Institutes of K-12 Educators: Support intensive one- to four-week projects in which sixteen to thirty schoolteachers, working with scholarly experts, engage in collegial study of significant texts and topics in the humanities. 17 grants, totaling $3.01 million
• Landmarks of American History and Culture: Support a series of one-week workshops for a national audience of K-12 and college educators that enhance and strengthen humanities teaching, focused on using particular places or communities to understand American history and culture. 18 grants, totaling $3.35 million
• Media Projects: Development and Production Grants: Support film, television, and radio projects that explore significant events, figures, and ideas within the humanities: development grants that enable media producers to collaborate with scholars to develop humanities content and to prepare programs for production; production grants that support the preparation of a project for presentation to the public. 16 grants, totaling $4.86 million
• National Digital Newspaper Program: Support the creation of a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1690 and 1963, from all states and U.S. jurisdictions. 9 grants, totaling $2.72 million
• Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions: Help institutions—particularly small and mid-sized institutions—improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections, including special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine arts, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture, and historical objects. 57 grants, totaling $541,972
• Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions, Historic Places, and Humanities Discussions: Support museum exhibitions, discussion programs, and interpretations of historic places that bring the ideas and insights of the humanities to life for general audiences. 12 grants, totaling $2.33 million
• Public Scholars: Support well-researched books in the humanities aimed at a broad public audience. 25 grants, totaling $1.4 million
• Scholarly Editions and Translations: Support the preparation of editions and translations of texts that are valuable to the humanities but are inaccessible or available only in inadequate editions. 21 grants, totaling $5.29 million
• Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections: Support preventative conservation measures to prolong the useful life of collections to help cultural institutions preserve large and diverse holdings of humanities materials for future generations. 10 grants, totaling $2.17 million
• Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities: An international research collaboration of funders from the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, Poland, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom that supports interdisciplinary cooperation on humanities and social sciences research that addresses the challenges of the 21st century.

A full list of the 240 new awards by geographic location is available here.

Source

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