Friday, February 14, 2025

National Endowment for the Humanities distributes $22.6 million in grants for cultural centers and other humanities projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $22.6 million in grants for 219 humanities projects across the country. Among these are grants that will establish protocols for the stewardship and voluntary return of unethically acquired archaeological and ethnographic artifacts to their communities of origin; enrich K–12 educators’ understanding and teaching of the American Revolution through workshops at lesser-known historic sites around Boston; and produce an immersive virtual replica of the former Mount Pleasant Industrial Indian Boarding School, a boarding school established in Michigan by the U.S. government in 1893 to forcibly assimilate Native American children.

“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”

Several grants awarded during this funding cycle support small and mid-sized cultural institutions that serve as keepers of community history and culture in developing new interpretive materials for public tours and exhibitions, and in gathering oral histories and materials documenting local history. Twenty-seven small museums, historical societies, and heritage sites will receive NEH Public Impact Project grants for capacity-building projects that include a partnership among six historical organizations to present the history of the Underground Railroad in New Jersey; development of new interpretive plans for San Francisco’s Angel Island, the largest immigration station on the West Coast; and new resources on the history of Black Appalachians in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. Additional funding will support a rapid response community archivist program in Wisconsin to help Native communities address urgent archival and collections management projects to mitigate the loss of culturally significant knowledge.

Grants awarded 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. New funding will create a program at the University of North Florida to prepare undergraduates for careers in collections care through hands-on training at local Florida historical organizations and help undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Arizona learn best practices for archival management and analysis specific to heritage collections from the American Southwest. It will also support new training programs at Rochester Institute of Technology for scholars and library, archive, and museum professionals in using multispectral imaging to uncover hidden elements and information about cultural heritage materials.

NEH Humanities Initiatives grants will fund educational resources, programs, curricula, and other projects that enhance teaching and learning in the humanities at 26 two- and four-year colleges and universities. These awards will support a “debate across the curriculum” project at the University of Utah to incorporate training in debating skills, reasoning, and argumentation into undergraduate humanities courses; a curriculum at West Virginia University focusing on the social, ethical, and technical aspects of artificial intelligence (AI); new minor and certificate programs in museums, archives, and gallery studies at Saint Regis University in Denver; and a student digital humanities project at Tarrant County College using geospatial technology to record the oral, architectural, and national history of Fort Worth’s North Side neighborhood to create an accessible local history archive and educational resource.

Several projects apply new technologies and digital methods to innovative humanities public programs and research, such as development of an immersive virtual reality (VR) game that explores the history of ancient Peru and teaches users about the archaeological methods that shed light on ancient Andean culture. Other grants will allow Shakespeare scholars and developers at the University of Idaho to create a free web-based tool for use in high school and college classrooms that will gather, preserve, and publish important dramaturgical information such as script annotations, interpretive essays, and glossaries. And they will support work by researchers at Wichita State University on a digital application to convert multimodal texts that include images and graphics into fully accessible versions for blind and low-vision users.

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 military history of the United Nations’s twentieth-century peacekeeping operations; a critical edition of the first known cookbook in the English language, The Forme of Cury, published circa 1390; an anthology of Lakota and Dakota literature in translation; and a book on the builders, craftsmen, laborers, and artisans who constructed Renaissance Rome’s architectural masterpieces.

This funding cycle also includes a cooperative agreement between NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to hold a national convening to evaluate the current state of humanities graduate education and make recommendations for graduate programs that prepare students for a variety of humanities-related careers. This three-year project will examine aspects of current graduate programs such as admissions, recruitment, advising and retention of graduate students, graduate student labor, curricular innovation, and preparation for both academic and non-academic careers, with a view to creating significant and long-lasting change within graduate education in the humanities.

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.

Related Articles

Latest Articles