Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) invites applications to the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program. This program is designed to encourage innovations in the digital humanities. By awarding relatively small grants to support the planning stages, NEH aims to encourage the development of innovative projects that promise to benefit the humanities.

Amount: $50,000

Due: October 6, 2009

Two levels of awards will be made in this program. Level I awards are small grants designed to fund brainstorming sessions, workshops, early alpha-level prototypes, and initial planning. Level II awards are larger grants that can be used formore fully-formed projects that are ready to begin implementation or the creation of working prototypes.

For more information, click here.

Interpreting America's Historic Places: Planning Grants

Interpreting America’s Historic Places grants support public humanities projects that exploit the evocative power of historic places to explore stories, ideas, and beliefs that deepen our understanding of our lives and our world. Interpreting America’s Historic Places projects may interpret a single historic site or house, a series of sites, an entire neighborhood, a town or community, or a larger geographical region.

Amount: $400,000

Due: August 26, 2009

Planning grants are available for those projects that may need further development before applying for implementation. This planning can include the identification and refinement of the project’s main humanities ideas and questions, consultation with scholars in order to strengthen the humanities content, preliminary audience evaluation, preliminary design of the proposed interpretive formats, beta testing of digital formats, development of complementary programming, research at archives or sites whose resources might be used, or the drafting of interpretive materials.

For more information, click here.

Interpreting America's Historic Places: Implementation Grants

Interpreting America’s Historic Places grants support public humanities projects that exploit the evocative power of historic places to explore stories, ideas, and beliefs that deepen our understanding of our lives and our world. Interpreting America’s Historic Places projects may interpret a single historic site or house, a series of sites, an entire neighborhood, a town or community, or a larger geographical region.

Amount: $400,000

Due: August 26, 2009

Implementation grants support the final preparation of a project for presentation to the public. Applicants must submit a full walkthrough for an exhibition, or a prototype or storyboard for a digital project, that demonstrates a solid command of the humanities ideas and scholarship that relate to the subject.

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Teaching Development Fellowships (NEH)

Teaching Development Fellowships (TDF) support college and university teachers pursuing research aimed specifically at improving their undergraduate teaching. The program has three broad goals: 1) to improve the quality of humanities education in the United States; 2) to strengthen the link between research and teaching in the humanities; and 3) to foster excellence in undergraduate instruction.

Amount: $21, 000 (for 5 months)

Due: October 1, 2009

Projects must improve an existing undergraduate course that has been taught in at least THREE different terms and will continue to be taught by the applicant. The research undertaken as a part of the project may involve engaging with fundamental texts or sources, exploring related subjects or academic disciplines, or cultivating neglected areas of learning. Projects may entail the acquisition of new language or digital skills as a means to performing the proposed research. The project must be directed primarily towards course improvement, not scholarly publication.

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Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announces the availability of the Enduring Questions grant program supports a faculty member’s development of a new course that will foster intellectual community through the study of an enduring question. This course will encourage undergraduate students and a teacher to grapple with a fundamental question addressed by the humanities, and to join together in a deep and sustained program of reading in order to encounter influential thinkers over the centuries and into the present day.

Amount: $25,000

Due: September 15, 2009

An Enduring Questions grant supports the development of a new undergraduate humanities course that must be taught at least twice during the grant period. The grant supports the work of a faculty member in designing, preparing, and assessing the course. It may also be used for ancillary activities that enhance faculty-student intellectual community, such as visits to museums and artistic or cultural events. An Enduring Questions course may be taught by a faculty member from any department or discipline in the humanities or by a faculty member outside the humanities (e.g., astronomy, biology, economics, law, mathematics, medicine, psychology), so long as humanities sources are central to the course.

For more information, click here.