NEH Announces New Director and Office of Outreach  

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is pleased to announce the appointment of Russell Wyland as the agency’s first Director of Outreach and the establishment of NEH’s new Office of Outreach.

In this new role, Wyland will oversee NEH’s outreach programs and strategy and deepen the agency’s engagement with communities and organizations that have been historically underserved by NEH. The Office of Outreach will establish new methods of agency outreach to historically underserved communities, increase the accessibility of the agency’s grant application process, and expand NEH’s roster of peer reviewers to include greater participation from members of previously underrepresented communities, disciplines, and institutions. NEH created the new Office of Outreach under the agency’s Equity Action Plan. In 2023, NEH created the Office of Data and Evaluation as part of its implementation of the Equity Action Plan and will soon launch an incoming Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) to advance NEH’s commitment to DEIA.  

“We are delighted to welcome Russ Wyland to this important new role at NEH,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “In his career at NEH, Wyland has demonstrated a deep commitment to fostering humanities research and scholarship and has shown skill in forging new partnerships and programs to broaden the reach of NEH’s grantmaking. He is an ideal ambassador for NEH in strengthening our outreach to new institutions and communities to ensure that NEH’s funding benefits all Americans.”

Wyland has spent more than three decades promoting the humanities as both a grant administrator and scholar, including more than 33 years at NEH. His expertise has been integral to advancing the agency’s commitment to individual scholars and teams of researchers. For the last 14 years, Wyland has served as the Deputy Director of NEH’s Division of Research Programs, where he has been responsible for program development, most recently as the architect for the NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication grant program. He is the principal author of “Research Fellowships: An Evaluation of 2002-2004 Awards” (GPO, 2012), which used qualitative and quantitative data to assess the role played by NEH funding in sustaining humanities research in the United States. He has extensive experience developing, launching, and administering joint funding opportunities with NEH’s federal and nonprofit partners, including the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, National Science Foundation, Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, the Mellon Foundation, and the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities. Wyland has also conducted more than 70 outreach workshops with colleges, universities, state humanities councils, and scholarly organizations, and has directed site visits to NEH-funded projects in the United States, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt, among others.  

Wyland holds a BA in English and theology from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and an MA and PhD in English literature from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His scholarship focuses on late Romantic and early Victorian literature, the history of classical rhetoric in England, and the development of the periodical press during the nineteenth century. He received the 2000 VanArdsel Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and his research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society and the English-Speaking Union. His work has been published in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Rhetorica, and the Victorian Periodicals Review.  

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 neh.gov.