National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Announces $28.6 Million in New Grants, 233 Projects Awarded Funding

From NEH:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $28.6 million in grants for 233 humanities projects across the country.

Grant awards announced today will preserve the papers of American writer Eudora Welty and create a digital repository of her manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and sound recordings, and enable production of a documentary by filmmaker Ric Burns on the life and work of Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.

Highlights 
Emphasis ours

Newly awarded NEH infrastructure grants will provide for the restoration of the steeple and tower of Philadelphia’s Christ Church, a national historic landmark, whose congregation once included George Washington, Betsy Ross, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. NEH Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants will also help the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians construct a tribal museum and cultural center in southwest Oregon focusing on the history and culture of the region’s Native American people and support renovations to the John Steinbeck Library in Salinas, California, to allow the library to exhibit and hold community educational events around its special collection of Steinbeck works.

Several grant projects will provide essential resources for the study of American history and culture. Three decades after the broadcast of the landmark PBS series Eyes on the Prize, a new NEH grant will, for the first time, ensure public access to 100 hours of original interviews of prominent civil rights leaders and grassroots activists upon which the documentary was based. Other grants will create an online archive documenting 100 years of women’s rights activism leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and digitize a collection of 65,000 handwritten survey responses by WWII soldiers reflecting on war and military service, collected by the Army between 1941 and 1945.

Other NEH awards will support a national “Warrior Chorus” initiative at Aquila Theatre to bring discussion programs and staged readings by military veterans of Homer’s Odyssey to veterans groups around the country. 

Education grants for curriculum innovation in the humanities will enable the creation of a minor in Appalachian studies at West Virginia Wesleyan College, implementation of a medical humanities program at the University of South Florida, and the development of an undergraduate certificate in cultural heritage recovery at the University of Rochester. NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War grants will support nine different humanities-based programs for military veterans and their families, including a veterans’ discussion project in Maui, focusing on ancient Native Hawaiian practices celebrating warriors’ homecoming. 

NEH Summer Stipends for scholars will enable archival research for more than eighty publications, including a book on the popularity of the writings of Ernest Hemingway in the Soviet Union, and a biography of 7th-century French Queen Balthild, who was born an Anglo-Saxon slave, became queen of the regions of Burgundy and Neustria, and was venerated as a saint after her death.

NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grants, administered in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), will provide for the documentation and creation of language-learning materials to help revitalize Sugpiaq, an endangered Alaskan Yupik language. And grants awarded through Humanities Open Book, a joint venture between NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will give second life to important out-of-print humanities books on regional U.S. history, Victorian literature and philosophy, and Germanic languages and literatures.

Direct to Complete Award Announcement

Direct to List of All Grants/Grant Recipients (by Geography)

A Selection of Additional Projects/Grants of Special Interest to Library/Archive Community

Arizona: Technological Anxiety and Hope: Artificial Intelligence in Digital Culture

California: Digitizing the Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican-American Recordings

Connecticut: Art and Bonna Vanderlyn Community Center/Hartford Public Library

Connecticut: Digitizing the Yale Babylonian Collection

Delaware: The Making of African-American Archives, 1910-1950

Georgia: Africana Digital Ethnography Project Collection Accessibility Program

Georgia: Georgia Open History Library: From Colony to Statehood

Georgia: Sounding Spirit Digital Library: Sacred Music from the Southern Diaspora, 1850–1925

Illinois: The Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection

Iowa: Haitian Art–A Digital Crossroads

Maryland: Preserving and Presenting the Past, Present, and Future of Dance History: Digitizing the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Archives

Massachusetts: Boston Digital Archaeology Project

Michigan: Art and Bonna Vanderlyn Community Center/Hartford Public Library

Minnesota: Preserving the Immigrant Experience

Montana: Cultivating Ourselves: Digitization and Access to Crow Historical and Cultural Resources

Nebraska: Charles Chesnutt: A Digital Archive

New York: Anthology Film Archives Library Project

New York: Bringing Brooklyn Beyond the Borough: Streamlining Access to Brooklyn Historical Society’s Collections Online

New York: Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project

New York: Preserving and Improving Access to the Boyer Collection

North Carolina: Penland School of Crafts: Securing a Visual Legacy

North Carolina: Recovering an Important Body of Work in German Studies: Reissuing the UNC Studies in Germanic Languages & Literatures Series

Ohio: Ohio University Press Humanities Open Book Program

Pennsylvania: Coasters, Culture, and Change: Processing and Digitizing the Kennywood Park Records

Pennsylvania: Digitizing the Sound and Sight of American Women’s Work for Peace and Justice

Pennsylvania: Rediscovering John W. Rhoden: Processing, Cataloging, Rehousing, and Digitizing the John W. Rhoden papers

South Carolina: The Digital Piranesi

Texas: Voices of the Vietnam War: Enhancing Access to Oral History Interviews with Vietnam Veterans

Virginia: Humanities Collaboration Center at Roanoke College

Virginia: Sharing 7,000 Years of Egyptian Culture with the American Research Center in Egypt’s Open Access Conservation Archive

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Awards, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Funding, Interactive Tools, Interviews, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation, Public Libraries