NEH Announces $31.5 Million for 226 Humanities Projects Nationwide

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $31.5 million in grants for 226 humanities projects across the country. These grants will support the publication of a Library of America anthology and accompanying national public programs series at 90 public libraries on 400 years of Latino poetry and enable the development of machine-learning algorithms to compare and classify features of Realist, Impressionist, and Barbizon School paintings to help art historians trace the spread of artistic styles.  

This round of funding, NEH’s third and last for fiscal year 2022, will support vital humanities research, education, preservation, and public programs. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $52 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and jurisdictional humanities councils. 

“NEH is proud to support the many scholars, curators, storytellers, filmmakers, and teachers who are helping preserve, examine, and share the country’s rich and expansive history and culture,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “From books and documentaries to the preservation of cultural heritage materials, these 226 exceptional projects will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources, and experiences.”

Among the projects to receive funding are a “Digital Cairo” database and interpretive website tracking the urban transformation of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth century using Ottoman-era newspapers and a historical and archaeological exploration of the Cataract House hotel in Niagara Falls, New York, an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Additional grants will enable the development of Booksnake, a mobile app to allow users to view and manipulate digitized archival materials in augmented reality and support the creation of legal and ethical protocols for U.S.-based humanities researchers around data mining of large-scale digital collections of textual materials held outside of the United States.

NEH grants will also underwrite a new traveling exhibition on Jacob Lawrence’s 1964–65 Nigeria series and the artistic exchange between the African American painter and his contemporaries in West Africa and support planning of a bilingual traveling exhibition and public programs examining Mexican Americans’ representation and participation in American filmmaking from the 1920s to the present. New funding for media projects will make possible a film about the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays since the publication of the First Folio in 1623 and a documentary on the life and work of Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez, as well as a podcast series on the history and legacy of the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project.

New funding for scholarly editions and translations will enable continued work on several longstanding NEH-supported editorial projects, including the nine-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867; the complete works of George and Ira Gershwin; and the collected papers of influential figures such as Thomas Edison, Jane Addams, and seven U.S. presidents; and translations of The Divine Tragedy by twelfth-century Sufi poetʿAṭṭār of Nishapur and oral folktales of the Dena’ina Alaska Native people.

Several newly funded projects will help preserve fragile historical and cultural collections and make them more accessible to the broader public, such as grants to safeguard a large collection of zooarchaeological artifacts at the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository that shed light on pre-historic bison hunting practices and funding to protect collections related to the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin West studio and home in Arizona. NEH Preservation Assistance Grants will help 65 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 help preserve: the archives of the American Baptist Historical Society; materials related to the life and work of poet John Ashbery; and digital collections of records, aerial photography, and oral histories held by the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

NEH Public Scholars grants, which support popular nonfiction books in the humanities, will enable publication of 26 new titles, including: a book on Ben Franklin’s attitudes towards money and finance; a history of Civil War fugitive slave “contraband camps” and their role in bringing about the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation; a biography of American author Madeline L’Engle; and an account of the 1980s lawsuit against the CIA on behalf of the unwitting human subjects of the agency’s Cold War-era MK-Ultra mind control experiments.

Thirty-seven grants for summer seminars, institutes, and workshops will provide professional enrichment and research opportunities for K–12 schoolteachers and college faculty on topics such as: the history and cultural impact of the American automobile industry; Washington D.C.’s FDR Memorial and its connection to the U.S. disability rights movement; incorporating veterans’ oral histories into high school level history, social sciences, civics, and literature classes; and the political, cultural, and economic histories of the Buffalo Nations of the Assiniboine, Sioux, Blackfeet, Crow, Northern Arapaho, and Eastern Shoshone.

This round of funding also marks the addition of the 50th U.S. state to the National Digital Newspaper Program. Dartmouth College received NEH funding to serve as the hub of the New Hampshire Digital Newspaper Program, expanding the scope of the Chronicling America online database of historical American newspapers published between 1690 and 1963. Additional funding awarded in this round will support ongoing newspaper digitization work in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.

A full list of the 226 new awards by geographic location is available here.

NEH awarded grants in the following categories:

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