NEH Announces $34.79 Million for 97 Humanities Projects 

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $34.79 million in grants for 97 humanities projects across the country. These grants will support various humanities projects that celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary; the reinstallation of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s permanent galleries of eighteenth-century art of the Americas; fund a digital edition of more than 13,000 speeches, letters, and other writings by Frederick Douglass; and assist the 9/ 11 Memorial & Museum in decontaminating, documenting, and preserving plastic objects in its collection of items associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“The National Endowment for the Humanities is proud to support research, exhibitions, teacher training, and preservation projects that examine and illuminate our history, literature, and culture,” said NEH Acting Chairman Michael McDonald. “These NEH grants will produce new resources and media that will help Americans meaningfully engage with the nation’s founding principles as we approach the U.S. Semiquincentennial and ensure that educators, students, and the public have access to accurate, informative materials that deepen our understanding of the American story.” 

This funding cycle includes a special $10 million award to the University of Virginia to support expedited completion of editorial work on important papers related to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Founding Era to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. The project, “Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America: Creating and Sustaining Access to Founding Era/Early Republic Primary Sources” responds to the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order “Celebrating America’s Birthday,” and is part of the agency’s larger A More Perfect Union initiative focused on exploring America’s story and celebrating its 250 years of cultural heritage. This new funding builds on decades of investment by NEH in the research, editing, and publishing of comprehensive, authoritative editions of the papers of twelve U.S. presidents and important documents relating to the creation and evolution of the United States and its government. The largest grant thus far ever awarded by NEH, the $10 million award will help accelerate work by researchers at the University of Virginia and partner institutions on Founding Era papers projects such as those of George Washington and James Madison, and support improvements to the design and infrastructure of the Rotunda online publishing platform where these papers are made freely available to the public. The project also entails creation of a new public-facing web resource, IndependenceHub, that will celebrate the 250th anniversary with curated document-centric digital exhibits and interactive features highlighting events, ideas, and individuals significant to America’s Founding and Early Republic eras.

Additional NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grants will support continued work on other presidential papers projects, including the Adams Papers Editorial Project, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, and the collected correspondence by and to presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. They will also support the digital publication of the literary notebooks of modernist poet Marianne Moore and the creation of an annotated digital edition of the journalistic writings of poet Walt Whitman, which will include both his writings as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as well as 1,000 unsigned editorials from other publications that have been newly attributed to Whitman. 

Other grant awards intended to augment public commemorations of the United States’s 250th anniversary include funding for an open access edition of documents related to the naval history of the American Revolution, and underwriting of a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York examining the city’s role in the American Revolution. New grants will also enable production of four one-hour films for the “Handiwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026” series exploring American craft art traditions from diverse regions of the U.S. and support residential summer workshops for 5th- through 12th-grade teachers on the American Revolution in Philadelphia. 

Several newly funded projects will help preserve and expand access to important historical and cultural collections, such as upgrades to storage conditions for the New Orleans Museum of Art’s collection of photographs from 1840 to the present day, and a planning project to improve the preservation environment at Texas A&M University’s Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation for archaeological materials salvaged from underwater historic shipwreck sites. 

Grant awards for public programs and media projects that will bring humanities ideas and experiences to large public audiences include funding for an exhibition on ancient Etruscan culture at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco and a grant for production of a 16-part podcast series on how translations of the Bible have transformed cultures in the Americas and around the world. 

Nineteen grants for summer institutes and workshops will provide professional enrichment and research opportunities for K–12 educators and college faculty on topics such as the history of Florida’s “Space Coast”; Emily Dickinson’s poetry; the music, history, and culture of the Mississippi Delta; and the ancient Olympics and daily life in the ancient Mediterranean. 

Additional funding will establish a research center at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University to integrate humanities knowledge into the development of trustworthy AI tools in the health sector, and support archaeological analysis of the ancient Roman city of Gabii—located 11 miles outside of modern-day Rome—to shed light on the settlement’s development as an urban center and the formation of its civic and commercial infrastructure. New grants to research hubs in 10 states will advance the identification and digitization of American newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 for inclusion in the Chronicling America public database housed at the Library of Congress. 

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.