NEH Announces $22.2 Million for 224 Humanities Projects Nationwide

Grant awards support the preservation of historical collections, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, scholarly research, and curriculum projects.

 

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 7, 2020) — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $22.2 million in grants for 224 humanities projects across the country. These grants will enable the production of a 90-minute documentary on singer and civil rights pioneer Marian Anderson, support a Norman Rockwell Museum exhibition on Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series, and bolster the digital infrastructure of the Walt Whitman Archive to allow greater access to this online scholarly repository.

“In these somber times, when every individual, community, and organization in America is feeling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, it is a joy to be able to announce new projects that will produce vibrant humanities programs and resources for the reopening of our cultural centers and educational institutions,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “These 224 projects exemplify the spirit of the humanities and their power to educate, enrich, and enlighten.”

A number of projects were funded under NEH’s “A More Perfect Union” initiative, which supports efforts that promote a deeper understanding of U.S. history and culture and that advance civics education in preparation for the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.  These include the “Held in Trust” cooperative agreement with the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation to evaluate the state of cultural heritage conservation in the United States, and a grant to support development of new interpretive tours and exhibition galleries at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Several grants awarded today support the development, production, and distribution of radio and television programs, documentary films, and podcasts that bring the humanities to public audiences. Among these are grants for a two-hour film on author L. Frank Baum and the legacy of his classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and for a documentary on the life of Rywka Lipszyc, a 14-year-old girl whose diary was discovered in the rubble of the Auschwitz crematorium in 1945.

This funding cycle also includes the first grants made under NEH’s new Short Documentaries grant program, which includes a grant award for a series of 30-minute films about historic rural churches in the South. Other Public Program grants will fund production of the Kitchen Sisters’ podcast series “The Keepers,” which tells the stories of archivists, librarians, curators, and historians and the humanities collections in their care.

Newly funded projects include the cataloging and digitization of archival objects, photographs, and films at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, and the preservation of 540 hours of recorded Native Alaskan song, dance, and oratory from four decades of Sealaska Heritage Institute cultural festivals.

NEH Summer Stipends for scholars will enable archival research for more than 100 publications, including a biography of Founding Father John Jay, and a study on the social, political, and religious factors that influenced local responses to the 1918 influenza epidemic in Europe.

Also in this round of funding are grants to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine for a major traveling exhibition on the art of painter Winslow Homer and painter and sculptor Frederic Remington as a response to fin de siècle cultural changes; to the Museum of the American Revolution for an exhibition on women’s citizenship and voting rights in the Early American Republic; and to the Concord Museum for “At the Center of Revolution,” a new permanent exhibition, education materials, and public programs exploring the history of Concord, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Additional grants will support a national discussion program centered around the NEH-funded documentary Free for All, about U.S. public libraries.

Education grants for curriculum innovation in the humanities will fund the integration of cultural and language studies into the engineering curriculum at Purdue University in Indiana. New NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War grants will support a “Veteran to Scholar Bootcamp” at East Carolina University to assist returning veterans in their transition to university life, and a humanities-based discussion program at Messiah College on the experiences of women in the U.S. military.

NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grants, administered in partnership with the National Science Foundation, will underwrite work on a dictionary documenting dialects of the Muskogean language spoken by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. And nine new 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 New-York Historical Society, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

In addition, NEH made six new Chairman’s Grants since December 2019, totaling $168,452. Grantees include the Supreme Court Historical Society, which will receive $30,000 to create new content for its Landmark Cases website, a civics education tool used nationwide by secondary school educators and their students. Oglala Lakota College will receive a Chairman’s Grant of $28,516 to preserve and create access to unique audio and video collections held in its Woksape Tipi Archives and Tribal Repository, which document the tribe’s history and culture.

As recently announced, NEH also will receive $75 million in supplemental funding to assist cultural institutions and humanists affected by the coronavirus pandemic as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act economic stabilization plan appropriated by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump. NEH Chairman Peede has confirmed that 100 percent of this supplemental funding will be distributed to grantees; none will be used for the federal agency’s operational expenses. These emergency relief grants will be awarded on a rolling basis and will be announced separately.

 

A list of grants by geographic location is available here.

Information on recent Chairman's Grants is available here.

Grants were awarded in the following categories:

Dialogues on the Experience of War

 

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

9 grants, totaling $809,851

Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowships and Preservation Grants  

 

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

6 grants, totaling $936,125

Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

 

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

 

9 grants, totaling $2.3 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.

 

32 grants, totaling $7.7 million

Humanities Connections

 

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

 

18 grants, totaling $881,453

Media Projects: Development and Production Grants

 

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

 

9 grants, totaling $2.7 million

Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions 

 

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

 

20 grants, totaling $4.8 million

Public Humanities Projects: Historic Places

 

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

 

2 grants, totaling $115,000

Public Humanities Projects: Humanities Discussions

 

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

 

1 grant, totaling $310,000

Short Documentaries

 

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

 

2 grants, totaling $110,000

Summer Stipends 

 

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

 

108 grants, totaling $648,000

Chairman’s Grants

 

Support the public humanities and access to the nation’s cultural heritage, especially in the context of the Semiquincentennial of the United States.

 

6 grants, totaling $168,452

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New York State had 35 winners amounting to $3,540,207.  

Albany

New York State Archives Partnership Trust Outright: $52,029 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: David Hochfelder Project Title: A Statewide Inventory of Urban Renewal Records Project Description: An online statewide inventory of municipal records documenting urban renewal in New York from 1949 to 1974, to facilitate planning for the digitization of the materials.

Amherst

Jeehyun Lim Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] SUNY Research Foundation, University at Buffalo Project Title: Unforgetting the Korean War: Cultural Representation and Memory, 1950– 2017 Project Description: Writing of a chapter and related article for a book examining cultural representations of the Korean War.

Annandale-on-Hudson

regory Morton Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Bard College Project Title: Return from the World: Stories of Leaving Economic Growth Behind in Northeastern Brazil Project Description: Research and writing of a chapter for a book on why migrant laborers in northeast Brazil choose to leave their higher-paying urban jobs and return to their rural homes. John Burns Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Project Title: Translation of Ave Soul by Peruvian Poet Jorge Pimentel (1944– ) Project Description: Research, writing, and translating a book of poetry by Peruvian poet Jorge Pimentel (1944– ).

Bronx

Jordan Stein Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Fordham University Project Title: Pequod on the Seine: Translating Melville in War and Peace Project Description: Research leading to a book on the translation and reception of the works of Herman Melville, American novelist, in France and Belgium.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences Outright: $75,000 [Exhibitions: Planning] Project Director: Nancy Rosoff Project Title: Brooklyn Museum: Katsinam: Spirits of the Hopi World Project Description: Planning of a traveling exhibition on the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s collection of Hopi Katsina dolls.

Green-Wood Historic Fund Outright: $144,940 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Anthony Cuccihara Project Title: Providing Access to the Records of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery Project Description: Transcription of the Green-Wood Cemetery's historical burial registry, which contains records from 1840 to 1937 of 438,180 citizens interred in the cemetery. The registry's contents would be transformed into a database searchable through the cemetery’s website and available for full download

Corning

Corning Museum of Glass Outright: $75,000 [Exhibitions: Planning] Project Director: Carole Ann Fabian Project Title: Reimagining 35 Centuries of Glass Project Description: Planning for the reinterpretation of an encyclopedic glass exhibition.
 

Flushing

Thomas Ort Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] CUNY Research Foundation, Queens College Project Title: Heydrich’s Shadow: The History, Memory, and Meaning of an Assassination Project Description: Archival research for a book on the Czech reception history of the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi Germany’s governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Mastic

Allison McGovern Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] CUNY Research Foundation, Queens College NEH Grant Offers and Awards, April 2020 Page 23 of 39 400 7th Street, S.W., 4th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20506 P 202.606.8446 www.neh.gov Project Title: Long Island Dirt: Recovering our Buried Past through Historical Archaeologies Project Description: Research and writing the introduction of a book on the historical archaeology of Long Island, New York.

New York

Abigail Santamaria Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] CUNY Research Foundation, Graduate School and University Center Project Title: The Life of American Author Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) Project Description: Research and writing leading to a literary biography of the American writer Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007)

American Academy in Rome Outright: $255,000 [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions] Project Director: Mark Robbins Project Title: Long-Term Research Fellowships at the American Academy in Rome Project Description: 16 months of stipend support (1.5 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

Asia Society Outright: $400,000 [Exhibitions: Implementation] Project Director: Adriana Proser Project Title: Asian Religious Traditions and Depictions of the Afterlife Project Description: Implementation of a traveling exhibition of Asian artworks inspired by religious and cultural beliefs about Hell.

Center for Jewish History Outright: $65,500 [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions] Project Director: Malgorzata Bakalarz Duverger Project Title: Long-Term Research Fellowships for Senior Scholars at the Center for Jewish History Project Description: 12 months of stipend support (1 fellowship) per year for one year and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

Courtney Chatellier Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] New York University Project Title: American Literature and the Politics of Translation in the Age of Revolutions, 1789–1815 Project Description: Revision of two chapters of a book on the influence of French texts and ideas in the early American republic.

Frick Collection Outright: $350,000 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Anastasia Levadas Project Title: Completion of Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive Digitization Project Description: Digitization of 73,894 photographs of American and European sculpture and American gallery inventories from the twentieth century. The project would complete online access to the Frick's 1.2 million reference images.

Jeremy Fortier Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] City College of New York Project Title: How Rational Does Democracy Need to Be? Project Description: Writing two to three chapters of a book about the kind of reasoning necessary for citizens in a liberal democracy.

Kevin Kenny Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] New York University Project Title: Slavery and Immigration, an American History (1789–1889) Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the interrelationship of immigration standards and slavery in federal policy, constitutional reform, and political action after the Civil War.

Museum of Arts and Design Outright: $40,000 [Exhibitions: Planning] Project Director: Elissa Auther Project Title: Exhibition Planning Project: Museum of Arts and Design, Materials that Make a Difference Project Description: Planning meetings for the reinterpretation of the permanent collections of design and craft.

Museum of the City of New York Outright: $40,000 [Exhibitions: Planning] Project Director: Steven Jaffe Project Title: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall Project Description: Planning of a temporary exhibition exploring the role of Tammany Hall in the evolution of American politics from 1786 to 1967.

New York Public Library Outright: $288,000 [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions] Project Director: Matt Knutzen Project Title: Long-Term Research Fellowships at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building Project Description: 18 months of stipend support (2 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

New-York Historical Society Outright: $55,000 [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions] Project Director: Michael Ryan Project Title: Long-term Research Fellowships at the New-York Historical Society Project Description: 10 months of stipend support (1 fellowship) per year for one year and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

Rattapallax, Inc. Outright: $60,000 [Short Documentaries] Project Director: Ram Devineni Project Title: Ginsberg’s Karma Project Description: Production of a documentary about the American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–97).

Ross Perlin Outright: $60,000 [Documenting Endangered Languages - Fellowships] Endangered Language Alliance Project Title: Creating and Annotating a Seke Language Corpus Project Description: Fieldwork to document and analyze Seke, an endangered language from the southeastern Himalayan region, through audio and video recordings of stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and histories of Seke speakers.

Sreenjaya Banerjee Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] CUNY Research Foundation, Stella and Charles Guttman Community College Project Title: British Modernist Fiction and Spatiality Project Description: Research and writing of the conclusion for a book on metaphors of spatiality in modernist fiction, looking at the work of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot's discussions of ”space and place.”

Treasury of Lives, Inc. Outright: $349,475 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Alexander Gardner Project Title: The Treasury of Lives Encyclopedia: Creating Access to the People and Places of Tibet, Inner Asia Project Description: Expansion and development of an online resource that documents the history, people, and places of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region. The project would expand the technical infrastructure of the current resource to include linked open data and would expand content by adding new biographies and geographic data.

WNET Outright: $650,000 [Media Projects Production] Project Director: Michael Kantor Project Title: American Masters: Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands Project Description: A documentary film about the singer Marian Anderson (1897–1993).

Yakov Klots Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] CUNY Research Foundation, Hunter College Project Title: Contraband Russian Literature and the Cold War (1956–1991) Project Description: Research and writing of a book chapter on Soviet authors Andre Sinyavsky(1925–1997) and Yuli Daniel (1925–1988) and their reception within and outside of the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

Young Men and Young Women’s Hebrew Association Outright: $350,000 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Christopher Bynum Project Title: Preservation of and Increased Access to the 92nd Street Y Humanities Audio Archives Project Description: Digital preservation of 854 tape-based audio recordings dating from 1956 to increase public access to the 92Y’s archive of lectures, conversations, debates, and panel discussions across the fields of language arts, fine arts, performing arts,cinema, philosophy, history, and Jewish studies, as well as jurisprudence, anthropology, sociology, psychology, media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.

Queens

Erika Vause Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] St. John's University, New York Project Title: Imagining Disaster: Insurance, Citizenship, and Financial Futures in Modern France Project Description: Research for a book on the history of insurance in modern France.

Rochester

St. John Fisher College Outright: $99,263 [Dialogues on the Experience of War] Project Director: Carolyn Vacca; Frederick Dotolo (co-project director) Project Title: St. John Fisher College’s Dialogues on the Experience of War Project Description: An expansion of a 2017 Dialogues on the Experience of War public discussion program for veterans in the greater Rochester community, which trains student veterans to lead discussions of ethics, civic engagement, and the experiences of war and military service.

University of Rochester Outright: $35,000 [Humanities Connections Planning Grants] Project Director: William Bridges Project Title: The Humanities and the Study of the Future Project Description: A one-year planning grant to create a minor and three-course cluster in future studies.

Saratoga Springs

Sabrina Abrams Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] SUNY Research Foundation, Empire State College Project Title: The Politics of Humor during the Interwar Period: New York Women of Wit Project Description: Research and writing one chapter of a book on women’s humor in New York City, 1920–1950.

Syracuse

Douglas Egerton Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Le Moyne College Project Title: The Ally: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Boston Brahmin, Radical Minister, Labor Agitator, Vigilance Committee Activist Project Description: Research for a biography of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823– 1911), artist and public intellectual of the nineteenth century.

Leigh Fought Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Le Moyne College Project Title: A Biography of Sally Hemings (1773–1835) Project Description: Onsite research at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for a short biography of Sally Hemings

 

 

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.  

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