OARS funding Humanities

The Expeditions Council is an editorially driven grant program that supports exploration and adventure worldwide.  Proposed projects must have the potential to yield compelling stories and images. Applications are also judged on the qualifications of applicants and their teams, and on the project's merit, uniqueness and safety protocols. The Council consists of representatives of National Geographic editorial divisions (magazines, television, books, website, and so on) who review and vote on grant applications, as well as an advisory board of external consultants. While the Expeditions Council funds a broad range of exploration and adventure, if a project is based on scientific inquiry, applicants must provide detailed methodology.  In addition, all projects must adhere to applicable scientific or professional ethical standards, which are outlined in the grant application and are subject to scientific review The Expeditions Council offers its grantees the opportunity to work effectively with National Geographic's many divisions. Grantees are therefore able to share the results of their expeditions with National Geographic's global audience.

Fellowships support individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. Recipients usually produce articles, monographs, books, digital materials, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly resources in the humanities. Projects may be at any stage of development.

NEH challenge grants are capacity-building grants, intended to help institutions and organizations secure long-term support for their humanities programs and resources. Through these awards, many organizations and institutions have been able to increase their humanities capacity and secure the permanent support of an endowment. Grants may be used to establish or enhance endowments or spend-down funds that generate expendable earnings to support and enhance ongoing program activities. Challenge grants may also provide capital directly supporting the procurement of long-lasting objects, such as acquisitions for archives and collections, the purchase of equipment, and the construction or renovation of facilities needed for humanities activities. Funds spent directly must be shown to bring long-term benefits to the institution and to the humanities more broadly. Grantee institutions may also expend up to 10 percent of total grant funds (federal funds plus matching funds) to defray costs of fundraising to meet the NEH challenge. Because of the matching requirement, these NEH grants also strengthen the humanities by encouraging nonfederal sources of support.

Preservation and Access Research and Development grants support projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources. These challenges include the need to find better ways to preserve materials of critical importance to the nation¿s cultural heritage¿from fragile artifacts and manuscripts to analog recordings and digital assets subject to technological obsolescence¿and to develop advanced modes of searching, discovering, and using such materials. Applicants should define a specific problem, devise procedures and potential solutions, and explain how they would evaluate their projects and disseminate their findings. Project results must serve the needs of a significant number of humanists.

The Eberly Family Special Collections Library on the University Park campus of Penn State offers travel awards of $1,500 for researchers whose work would benefit from access to the collections held at Penn State. Currently, three travel grants are available: The Dorothy Foehr Huck Research Travel Award: Supports one award for researchers using any collection from the Special Collections Library. The Helen F. Faust Women Writers Research Travel Awards: Supports two awards for researchers working on a project including women writers that would benefit from use of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library's collections The Albert M. Petska Eighth Air Force Archives Research Travel Award: supports one award for researchers working on a project pertaining to history of the Eighth Air Force during World War II.

The Faculty of Humanities, the School of History, and the Department for Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa, in partnership with the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben Gurion University of the Negev will grant fellowships to outstanding doctoral students who wish to focus their research on aspects of religious conversions of Christians and Jews in Late Antiquity and the Classical Islamic period.*

The Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies at Liverpool Hope University is pleased to be able to offer up to two fee waivers for applicants to the MA Peace Studies. The fee waivers will cover home or overseas fees and will be available for the September 2014 start. The application deadline for fee waivers is 3rd March 2014.

The Sallie Bingham Center provides travel grants of up to $1000 for researchers whose work would benefit from access to the women's history collections held at Duke's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The grants are named in honor of Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham.

We are pleased to announce that the new OARS website is up and running (although the new Research Compliance and Undergraduate Research sections are still in development).   If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, we hope you will soon.  Once you've visited, we'd be grateful if you'd give us five minutes of your time to let us know how we're doing by completing a brief eight-question survey at https://miamioh.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_erhRsEFwwWVP6m1 Finally, don't forget to update any bookmarks you may have to material on our old website!

These grants support faculty development programs in the humanities for school teachers and for college and university teachers. NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes may be as short as two weeks or as long as five weeks. NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes ¿ extend and deepen knowledge and understanding of the humanities by focusing on significant topics and texts; ¿ contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of participants; ¿ build communities of inquiry and provide models of civility and excellent scholarship and teaching; and ¿ link teaching and research in the humanities. An NEH Summer Seminar or Institute may be hosted by a college, university, learned society, center for advanced study, library or other repository, cultural or professional organization, or school or school system. The host site must be suitable for the project, providing facilities for scholarship and collegial interaction. These programs are designed for a national audience of teachers. Program formats ¿ Seminar for school teachers¿sixteen participants (NEH Summer Scholars): A seminar enables sixteen participants (of whom two may be full-time graduate students who intend to pursue a K-12 teaching career) to examine an important text, study works of well-known authors, or review scholarship on a significant historical period or event. The principal goals are to deepen teachers¿ understanding of the subject at hand through reading, discussion, reflection, and writing, and to sustain their intellectual commitment to teaching. 

These NEH grants support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through these programs, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities. The projects may be a single opportunity or offered multiple times to different audiences. Institutes may be as short as a few days and held at multiple locations or as long as six weeks at a single site. For example, training opportunities could be offered before or after regularly occurring scholarly meetings, during the summer months, or during appropriate times of the academic year. The duration of a program should allow for full and thorough treatment of the topic.

Grant money may be used for the following: transportation expenses (including air, train or bus ticket charges; car rental; mileage using a personal vehicle; parking fees) accommodations meals photocopying and reproduction expenses

Grants-in-Aid is the Friends program which helps to fund visiting scholars with particular research needs in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. The Friends award a handful of grants-in-aid annually, each of which is generally for one month's duration, for research in the humanities, sciences and related fields appropriate to the libraries' collection strengths.

Applications to the First Book Institute are invited from scholars working in any area or time period of American literary studies who hold a PhD and are in the process of writing their first book (whether a revised and expanded dissertation or other project).  Applicants should not have negotiated a formal agreement of any kind with a press to publish their manuscript. Electronic applications, due by February 17, 2014

The University of Chicago Library invites applications for short-term research fellowships for the summer of 2014. Any visiting researcher residing more than 100 miles from Chicago, and whose project requires on-site consultation of University of Chicago Library collections, primarily archives, manuscripts or printed materials in the Special Collections Research Center, is eligible. Support for beginning scholars is a priority of the program. Applications in the fields of late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century physics or physical chemistry, or nineteenth-century classical opera, will receive special consideration. Awards will be made based on an evaluation of the research proposal and the applicant's ability to complete it successfully.  Applicants should explain why the project cannot be conducted without on-site access to the original materials and to what extent University of Chicago Library collections are central to the research.  Up to $3,000 of support will be awarded to help cover projected travel, living, and research expenses.  Applications from women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are encouraged.

The Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and Virginia Tech's Special Collections invite applications for the 2014-15 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies Research Grants. Each grant recipient will visit Virginia Tech's Special Collections in order to conduct research on some aspect of the American Civil War era. An honorarium of $100 per business day will be provided, up to a maximum of $1,000. Recipients will also have the opportunity to give an informal presentation on their projects during their visit. Graduate students, faculty members, and independent scholars are all eligible. Virginia Tech's Special Collections contain one of the largest concentrations of Civil War-related research materials in the world, including 10,000 rare and unique printed sources, and hundreds of manuscript collections containing diaries, letters, ledgers, official papers, and other formats. Highlights include soldiers' accounts from both the Union and the Confederacy; printed memoirs and regimental histories; correspondence from the homefront; primary sources focused on slavery and abolitionism; papers documenting political change in Virginia and the South throughout the 1860s; and records of postwar groups focused on memorializing the Civil War. More information about our collections is available at http://spec.lib.vt.edu/civwar/

Media@McGill is a hub of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and public outreach on issues in media, technology and culture, located in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. To see the list of postdoctoral fellowships, click here. Media@McGill offers Postdoctoral Fellowships to promising scholars engaging in media-related research, as defined in Media@McGill's mission statement. Fellows are provided with a workspace, and are expected to take an active role in the research activities and academic life of Media@McGill (participation in conferences, seminars, etc.). They may also have the possibility of teaching a course within the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill. Eligibility: The Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellowship is open to both national and international scholars who completed their doctoral degrees in a university other than McGill no earlier than June 1, 2010. Candidates must have received their PhD by May 1, 2014. Fluency in English is essential; working knowledge of French is an asset. Value and Duration: The stipend for the Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellowship is $45,000 CAD for 12 months (this includes a travel research stipend) beginning in the first week of September 2014.

The Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies is offering a small number of highly competitive postdoctoral fellowships in the field of Russian and East European Studies for the 2014-2015 academic year. These fellowships are offered to researchers across all disciplines in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences, broadly defined, and will be awarded on the basis of academic excellence. Postdoctoral fellowships are offered to young scholars who have received their PhD degree no earlier than 2009 and no later than June 2014. The fellows will be selected by an international academic committee and then placed in one of the partner universities: Bar-Ilan University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa. Postdoctoral fellows will be awarded up to 87,500 NIS per year (equivalent to approximately $25,000). In some cases, the fellowships will entail a teaching commitment at the host university.

The Research Group "Alternatives to Democracy? The Social Order of Dictatorships" examines the question how dictatorial regimes - despite their inherent destructivity and repressive violence - create new orders of the political and the social that appeal to populations at large. The cases of pre-War Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev, and Spain during the Franco era will serve as fields of inquiry to address the following questions: Which are the pre-conditions that give rise to dictatorships? When are they seen as an appealing way out of political, social, and economic disruption? How are dictatorial regimes able to generate legitimacy? What kind of stability do they create on the backdrop of crisis, insecurity, and disorder? Essential Duties & Responsibilities: We expect successful candidates to conduct extensive archival research in one of the countries under consideration. Each successful applicant will closely co-operate with the team of organizers of the Research Group: Brigit Aschmann (Chair of Modern European and Spanish History), Jörg Baberowski (Chair of Russian and Soviet History) and Michael Wildt (Chair of German History). Successful applicants are expected to write and defend a dissertation. In their research, they are asked to address and discuss conceptual questions of comparative history, including the comparison of modern dictatorial regimes.

Launched in March 2012, the African Peacebuilding Network (APN) supports independent African research on conflict-affected countries and neighboring regions of the continent, as well as the integration of African knowledge into global policy communities.