Humanities Endowment Awards $12 Million for 346 New Grants
Awards include 50 We the People projects in U.S. history and culture
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced that 346 successful applicants will receive a total of $12 million in grants or offers of matching funds for projects in the following programs: NEH's special initiative, "Recovering Iraq's Past"; the U.S. Newspaper program; fellowships and faculty research awards; and preservation and access grants to help cultural institutions protect and preserve their collections.
Fifty of the successful grants announced today are designated as We the People projects, a special recognition by the NEH for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture.
"The humanities convey the story of civilization, and today's NEH grant recipients are deeply engaged in advancing that story through new scholarly research and taking important strides to preserve the material record of our history and culture," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "NEH supports projects that are rigorous, wide-ranging, and substantial in their examination and illumination of the great events and great ideas of the past in our own nation and throughout the world."
In this award cycle, institutions in 42 states and the District of Columbia received support from the NEH; three U.S. scholars working in other nations also received awards. A complete state-by-state listing of grants is available in four Adobe PDF files, located below. The 346 new NEH grants and matching offers come from the agency's special initiative, "Recovering Iraq's Past," and two of the Endowment's major program areas-research programs and preservation and access programs-with examples of each:
- "Recovering Iraq's Past" special initiative supports projects to preserve and document cultural resources in Iraq's archives, libraries, and museums with new awards made to the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (Chicago, Ill.); Simmons College (Boston, Mass.); the University of Chicago; and Yale University (New Haven, Conn.).
- The U.S. Newspaper Program (USNP) is a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government (NEH and the Library of Congress) to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. With new USNP awards, both designated as We the People projects, the Chicago Historical Society will microfilm Illinois newspapers, and the Pennsylvania State University will microfilm that state's historically significant newspapers.
- Fellowships and Faculty Research Awards support individuals pursuing advanced research in the humanities that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public's understanding of the humanities. Recipients usually produce scholarly articles, monographs on specialized subjects, books on broad topics, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools. Among the recipients of 2006 NEH Fellowships are Lynn Jacobs (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville), Ellen Harris (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge), Todd Hickey(University of California, Berkeley), Suzanne Smith (George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.), and James Stokes (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point). Faculty Research Awards support research in the humanities by faculty members at Historically Black, Hispanic-Serving, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. Awards for 2006 include ones to Ben Olguin (University of Texas, San Antonio), Ping Yao (California State University, Los Angeles), and Elizabeth Horodowich (New Mexico State University, Las Cruces). Fellowships and Faculty Research awards support the equivalent of six to twelve months of full-time work.
- Preservation and Access education and training grants support national or regional (multi-state) education and training programs on the care and management of, and the creation of intellectual access to, library, archival, and material culture collections. New education and training grants include ones made to the Northeast Document Conservation Center (Andover, Mass.), the University of Delaware (Newark), the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation(Washington, D.C.), and the University of Texas, Austin. Research and development grants support projects that advance the nation's capacity to preserve and provide access to humanities resources, with one award made to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-size institutions, such as libraries, museums, and historical societies, archival repositories, town and county records offices, and colleges, improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections. Awards made include ones to the Customs House Museum and Cultural Center (Clarksville, Tenn.), Iowa's Des Moines Art Center, Michigan's Detroit Historical Museum, Louisiana's East Baton Rouge Parish Library, and the Homesteader Museum (Powell, Wyo.).
Programs, total number of projects, and total dollar amounts for grants and matching funds included in this announcement are as follows:
Recovering Iraq's Past (special initiative) (4) $385,060
Research Programs (166) $6,368,000
- Fellowships for University Teachers (76) $2,928,000
- Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars (79) $3,032,000
- Faculty Research Awards (9) $328,000
- Fellowships for Advanced Research on Japan (2) $80,000
Preservation and Access (176) $5,237,209
- U.S. Newspaper Program (2) $992,559
- Education and training projects (8) $2,927,067 outright; $167,000 matching funds
- Research and development projects (1) $389,883
- Preservation Assistance Grants (165) $760,700
NEH grants are awarded on a competitive basis. Throughout the year, humanities experts outside of the Endowment and members of the National Council on the Humanities consider all applications and advise NEH on the quality and significance of each proposed project.