National Endowment For the Humanities (NEH) Announces $41.3 Million For 280 Humanities Projects Nationwide

From the National Endowment For the Humanities:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $41.3 million in grants for 280 humanities projects across the country. These grants will support a documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson on the life, work, and legacy of jazz legend Sun Ra; the creation of a set of linked online dictionaries of early Mayan languages; and analysis of pigment traces on the statuary at Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral to create a 3D model depicting the original colors of its medieval façade.

This round of funding, NEH’s third and last for fiscal year 2023, will support vital humanities education, research, preservation, and public programs. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $65 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and jurisdictional humanities councils.

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This round of funding also includes a $500,000 cooperative agreement with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to digitize and describe 120,000 pages of records from federal Indian boarding schools in conjunction with NEH’s partnership with the Department of the Interior on the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

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Other funding will support public humanities projects such as films, exhibitions, podcasts, and community discussion programs that bring humanities ideas and experiences to large public audiences. Grants will support a new exhibition on art, science, and innovation in the Islamic world; and planning for exhibitions on the evolution of Hawai’i’s legal and judicial system and on the history of the Cincinnati neighborhood of Avondale, home to the city’s largest African American community. Funding for media projects will enable production of an 8-hour documentary film series examining the U.S. criminal justice system from the colonial era to the present day; a feature-length documentary for PBS American Masters on the life and works of author, activist, educator, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel; and a podcast series that revisits the stories and themes of Studs Terkel’s first collection of oral histories, Division Street: America, through interviews with friends and family members of the original participants.

New awards for scholarly editions and translations will support collaborative teams of scholars in producing critical editions of the collected papers of Thomas Edison, the late life writings of poet Walt Whitman, and the letters of popular nineteenth-century American novelist Catharine Sedgwick. Additionally, they will underwrite work on a scholarly edition of the book of Psalms and an annotated English translation of the longest-running Indigenous-language newspaper in the U.S., Iapi Oaye (The Word Carrier), which was published in the Dakota language  from 1871 to 1939. National Digital Newspaper grants awarded in 12 states will support the ongoing digitization of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 for inclusion in the Chronicling America online database of historic American newspapers.

Additional grants will enable the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center and the American Geographical Society Library to expand the Allmaps software interface to allow for georeferencing of digitized historical maps and will support a digital project that incorporates geographic information system (GIS) mapping technology to explore the cultural, economic, and social influences of four discrete theater districts in London during the age of Shakespeare.

Learn More About Some of the Funded Projects, Read the Complete Announcement (Includes Amount of Funding by Category)

Direct to a List (by Location) of All 280 Funded Projects
49 pages; PDF.

Filed under: Awards, Digital Preservation, Funding, Interviews, Journal Articles, Libraries, Maps, News, Podcasts, Preservation