NEH Announces $75.1 Million for 84 Humanities Projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $75.1 million for 84 humanities projects across the country.

New awards include ten NEH Preservation and Access Education and Training grants to train museum, archival, and conservation professionals in new methods of preserving important records and artifacts of national cultural heritage. These include a grant to the American Institute of Physics to establish a cohort of archivists and librarians to develop practices for collecting, preserving, and enabling access to born-digital collections documenting the history of 21st-century science, technology, and engineering. An award to the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation will provide training to the nonprofit's network of National Heritage Responders, who deploy to assist cultural organizations with on-the-ground salvage and other needs after natural disasters.

Twenty-seven NEH Fellowships and Awards for Faculty will support individual scholars in conducting archival research for publications on topics such as: the early history of schooling and education in the United States; the evolution of Morehouse College campus in Atlanta over 125 years; religious pilgrimage practices among Christians, Jews, and polytheists during the Roman Empire; and how the works of Leo Tolstoy shaped the ideologies of the Soviets and émigrés who fled the Bolshevik Revolution.

Several grants will support scholarly, educational, and public programs designed to enhance national celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. NEH funding for these projects responds to the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order "Celebrating America's Birthday," and is part of the agency's larger A More Perfect Unioninitiative focused on exploring America's story and celebrating its 250 years of cultural heritage.

These include 19 NEH Public Impact Projects Celebrating America's 250th Anniversary grant awards to help cultural organizations create public programs celebrating the people, events, ideas, and legacies related to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Grant awards include funding to Connecticut Historical Society for an exhibition on the significance of the Declaration of Independence to Connecticut's history; to the Montgomery County Council for the Arts in Kentucky for a traveling exhibition, "Kentucky's Revolution: Life on the American Frontier;" and to the Museum Alliance of Rapid City, South Dakota, for a temporary exhibit, monthly lecture series, and educational materials exploring key local and national events from every fifty years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

This funding cycle also includes awards to projects and initiatives intended to strengthen teaching of the humanities in higher education. New NEH Humanities Initiatives grants will support the development of curricula, courses, and educational programs on eight college campuses. Among these are a curriculum development project at the University of Central Florida on the possibilities and challenges of generative artificial intelligence; an initiative at the University of Massachusetts to embed a course on deep reading of foundational texts of philosophy, literature, and history in the general education curriculum; and a new course and internship program at the University of Vermont that engages students in examination of Vermont's religious institutions and practices.

NEH Endowments for Advancing the Humanities grants will provide challenge funds for 20-year term endowments for the American Foundations program at the United States Military Academy for new faculty positions, a lecture series, and academic enrichment opportunities for cadets; and to the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to fund faculty positions in the American Political Tradition, Great Books and Leadership, and the Classical Tradition.

Four $3 million grants will advance the editing and publication of the collected papers of four U.S. presidents: John Adams, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren. This funding will accelerate the publication of authoritative editions of the public and private papers of presidents who played significant roles in the Founding Era and the evolution of the American democracy by allowing these projects to hire additional staff, travel to collections to identify and verify source materials, and invest in digital publishing infrastructure. It will also support a wide array of related public programs such as exhibitions, multimedia, symposia, and public lectures examining connections between the presidential papers and the Declaration of Independence and its legacy into the 19th century.

A cooperative agreement with the Museum of the American Revolution will support public programs and educational resources to extend the reach of the museum's current NEH-funded exhibition "The Declaration's Journey." These include a scholarly exhibition catalog and podcast series about the influence of the American Declaration of Independence on other international rights documents and movements, a public conference on the 250-year impact of the Declaration on international history, and an interactive digital resource that provides the history and context of passages of the Declaration and their connection to 450 other declarations of sovereignty and equality made across the globe since 1776.

Additional funding will underwrite a Blue Star Families' book club series for military families focusing on themes related to America's founding and patriotism, and a two-year series of conferences and debates on America's foundational principles and documents at Christopher Newport University's Center for American Studies.

A $10 million award to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE) will allow the nonprofit-which supports independent institutes and programs at 15 leading universities in the United States and United Kingdom-to offer new programs in classical humanities within the FEHE network and at other elite universities, and to provide grants for the development of courses, seminars, workshops, fellowships, and special initiatives focusing on themes such as humanities and civics, humanities and economics, and intellectual friendship and civil discourse. FEHE also plans to enlarge the pipeline of new humanities faculty through an "Emerging Scholars Program" of two-year mentorships for undergraduates interested in pursuing academic careers, and through graduate scholarships and two-year postdoctoral fellowships for young scholars in the humanities. In addition, the organization will host course-development workshops for humanities faculty and create one-year teaching fellowships for faculty members to develop innovative new courses in the humanities.

Ohio State University's Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society will receive a $5 million grant for faculty expansion, curriculum development, student scholarships, building renovation, and public programming to advance the center's civic education initiatives. An award to the Abigail Adams Institute (AAI) will support undergraduate seminars for Harvard University students and Boston area young professionals in political philosophy, as well as student fellowships in civics and the humanities, and faculty sabbatical fellowships focused on developing new undergraduate courses in history, literature, philosophy, and civics. NEH funding will underwrite nine fellowships for college graduates and three senior writer-in-residence opportunities at the Institute on Religion and Public Life and its journal, First Things; support a new Great Books program at the University of South Carolina; and create a Saint Dominics Fellows program for undergraduates at Providence College emphasizing the study of the Western tradition and Catholic thought. And a grant to Grand Central Atelier, a nonprofit focusing on classical art education and cultural preservation, will support an initiative honoring former NEH Chairman Bruce Cole that includes a public lecture series, studio lectures for art students, a symposium, a digital publication, and the creation of two new postdoctoral fellowships-all designed to deepen understanding of the intersections between art, history, and civic culture.

A full list of grants by geographic location is available here.

NEH awarded grants in the following categories:

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH):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.