OARS funding Humanities

COMAC builds upon previous USAID/Afghanistan programming, including the current Afghan Civilian Assistance Program (ACAP III) activity, which ends in February 2018. The original ACAP program supported Afghan civilian families and communities that have suffered losses as a result of the being caught between fighting among Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), Afghan National Army, and Resolute Support (RS) troops against the Taliban and other anti-government elements (AGEs). COMAC will provide tailored, small-scale assistance packages to eligible families to mitigate the immediate impact of the ongoing conflict on their lives. No cash disbursements are foreseen. Assistance will be provided based on individual family needs. COMAC's funding directive is to assist Afghan civilian victims harmed by military operations.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) announces a Request for Statements of Interest (RSOI) from organizations interested in submitting Statements of Interest (SOI) for programs that support the policy objective to foster respect for human rights in China.

The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) announces an open competition for organizations interested in submitting applications for projects that support the promotion and protection of religious freedom globally.

ACLS invites applications in China Studies. With the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (CCK) for International Scholarly Exchange, ACLS offers support for early career scholars and for the organization of meetings, workshops, and conferences. For complete guidelines, please visit www.acls.org/programs/china-studies/ and www.acls.org/programs/chinese-culture/.

National Leadership Grants for Museums support projects that address critical needs of the museum field and that have the potential to advance practice in the profession so that museums can improve services for the American public.

The Museums for America (MFA) program supports projects that strengthen the ability of an individual museum to serve its public.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) announces a Request for Statements of Interest (RSOI) from civil society organizations to promote and protect the human rights of marginalized populations. This request is seeking programs that take an intersectional approach to addressing violence and discrimination targeting marginalized populations, which undermine societys collective security, and programs that provide marginalized populations with tools to prevent, mitigate and recover from violence.

The Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections (SCHC) program helps cultural institutions meet the complex challenge of preserving large and diverse holdings of humanities materials for future generations by supporting sustainable conservation measures that mitigate deterioration, prolong the useful life of collections, and support institutional resilience: the ability to anticipate and respond to natural and man-made disasters. Cultural institutions, including libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations, face an enormous challenge: to preserve humanities collections that facilitate research, strengthen teaching, and provide opportunities for life-long learning. To ensure the preservation of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art, and historical objects, cultural institutions must implement measures that slow deterioration and prevent catastrophic loss from natural or man-made emergencies. They can accomplish this work most effectively through preventive conservation. Preventive conservation encompasses managing relative humidity, temperature, light, and pollutants in collection spaces; providing protective storage enclosures and systems for collections; and safeguarding collections from theft, fire, floods, and other disasters. As museums, libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions strive to be effective stewards of humanities collections, they must find ways to implement preventive conservation measures that are sustainable. This program therefore helps cultural repositories plan and implement preservation strategies that pragmatically balance effectiveness, cost, and environmental impact. Sustainable approaches to preservation can contribute to an institution's financial health, reduce its use of fossil fuels, and benefit its green initiatives, while ensuring that collections are well cared for and available for use in humanities programming, education, and r

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) support digital projects throughout their lifecycles, from early start-up phases through implementation and long-term sustainability. Experimentation, reuse, and extensibility are hallmarks of this grant category, leading to innovative work that can scale to enhance research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. You can find a discussion of the forms that experimentation can take in the Frequently Asked Questions document, which is available on the program resource page. This program is offered twice per year. Proposals are welcome for digital initiatives in any area of the humanities. Through a special partnership, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) anticipates providing additional funding to this program to encourage innovative collaborations between museum or library professionals and humanities professionals to advance preservation of, access to, use of, and engagement with digital collections and services. Through this partnership, IMLS and NEH may jointly fund some DHAG projects that involve collaborations with museums and/or libraries. Digital Humanities Advancement Grants may involve * creating or enhancing experimental, computationally-based methods, techniques, or infrastructure that contribute to the humanities; * pursuing scholarship that examines the history, criticism, and philosophy of digital culture and its impact on society, or explores the philosophical or practical implications and impact of digital humanities in specific fields or disciplines; or * revitalizing and/or recovering existing digital projects that promise to contribute substantively to scholarship, teaching, or public knowledge of the humanities.

Applicants for the funds may be students or faculty. The project, program, or entrepreneurial idea must be created by, led by or benefit women. Grants are awarded in values of $2500 to $20,000. While we prefer the base grant to be $5,000, we are considering a limited number of $2500 which will be required to show high impact. These applicants will be considered on a case-by-case basis. The grants must be submitted online via the link below and must include a 2-minute video. Applicants will be narrowed to a pool of 10-15 finalists by our M.I.A.M.I. WOMEN Grants Committee. This committee will review applications; contact applicants if additional information is required, and present the finalists to the M.I.A.M.I. WOMEN Steering Committee and Development Staff. Grant deadline for this year is Feb. 9, 2018. These finalists will perform in a fast-pitch style Hawk Tank event on April 11, 2018. Finalists will be offered fast-pitch training courtesy of the Farmers School of Business - school of Entrepreneurship, and will receive coaching and support. They will then pitch their idea in 5 minutes or less on April 11, 2018 at the event. Giving Circle members are the voters who will determine winners. Absentee voters will be given the option to vote online. Winners will be announced that night or the next day at the Symposium, to be determined.

The Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants program supports activities such as the documentation of cultural heritage materials that are lost or imperiled, the preservation and conservation of humanities materials, and the sustaining of digital scholarly infrastructure. The application deadline is March 15, 2018.

The Course Hero-Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching will support rising stars in the academy who love teaching, demonstrate excellence as educators, and are making their mark as exceptional researchers, poised to shape their fields. Designed for young scholars working towards tenure, the Course Hero-WW Fellowship is a "genius grant" that will emphasize the balance between scholarly excellence and commitment to teaching practice that draws on new approaches to pedagogy, creating a new level of engagement for students in and beyond the classroom. In short, Fellows will be emerging heroes in their fields, on a clear trajectory to become great college educators. In its inaugural year, the Course Hero-WW Fellowship will identify five outstanding junior faculty members. Fellows will receive a one-year grant of $40,000-approximately $30,000 to support the engagement of a student assistant and the balance to be used for research and travel support. Exceptional candidates teach in ways that build student confidence and mastery of a subject; encourage critical thinking; explore foundational concepts through the lens of broader themes and global events; promote the power of learning communities beyond the classroom; leverage technology to complement the classroom experience; consider and serve different learning styles; prepare students for lifelong learning; and can serve as replicable teaching models for other educators. Selection takes place in June 2018. The five Fellows will be invited to attend the Course Hero Education Summit in July 2018, where their Fellowships will be announced.

The Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership have announced that applications are now open for the Abe Fellowship for Journalists. The fellowship is designed to encourage in-depth coverage of topics of pressing concern to the United States and Japan through individual short-term policy-related projects. Applicants are invited to submit proposals on one of four themes. 1) Threats to Personal, Societal, and International Security: Topics may include food, water, and energy insecurity; pandemics; climate change; disaster preparedness, prevention, and recovery; and conflict, terrorism, and cyber security. 2) Growth and Sustainable Development: Topics may include global financial stability, trade imbalances and agreements, adjustment to globalization, climate change and adaptation, and poverty and inequality. 3) Social, Scientific, and Cultural Trends and Transformations: Topics may include aging and other demographic change, the benefits and dangers of reproductive genetics, gender and social exclusion, expansion of STEM education among women and underrepresented populations, migration, rural depopulation and urbanization, impacts of automation on jobs, poverty and inequality, and community resilience. 4) Governance, Empowerment, and Participation: Topics may include challenges to democratic institutions, participatory governance, human rights, the changing role of NGO/NPOs, the rise of new media, and government roles in fostering innovation.

The Preservation and Access Education and Training program supports the development of knowledge and skills among professionals responsible for preserving and establishing access to humanities collections. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture collections, electronic records, and digital objects. The challenge of preserving and making accessible such large and diverse holdings is enormous, and the need for knowledgeable staff is significant and ongoing. Preservation and Access Education and Training grants are awarded to organizations that offer national or regional education and training programs that reach audiences in more than one state. Grants aim to help the staff of cultural institutions, large and small, obtain the knowledge and skills needed to serve as effective stewards of humanities collections. Grants also support educational programs that prepare the next generation of preservation professionals, as well as projects that introduce the staff of cultural institutions to new information and advances in preservation and access practices.

The CGS Advisory Committee for the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities requests nominations for the 2018 competition in the field of English and North American Language and Literature. To be eligible for competition, the nominee must meet the criteria stated below: 1. The recipient must have received the doctorate within seven years of the award, and currently teach at a U.S. or Canadian university. 2. The recipient must have taken the degree at a U.S. or Canadian university. 3. The book being considered must have been published within seven years of the award. The book must have been written in or translated into English. 4. The book must represent an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the field. There can be only one nominee from each institution, and nominations are to be submitted by the office of the graduate dean or equivalent institutional officer. Miami University faculty wishing to be nominated should contact the dean of the Graduate School, Jim Oris (orisjt@MiamiOH.edu).

National Leadership Grants for Libraries (NLG-Libraries) and National Leadership Grants for Museums (NLG-Museums), under which this special initiative falls, support projects that address challenges faced by the library and museum fields and that have the potential to advance practice in those fields. Successful projects will generate results such as new tools, research findings, models, services, practices, or alliances that can be widely used, adapted, scaled, or replicated to extend the benefits of federal investment. What is this special initiative? Activating Community Opportunities Using Museums/Libraries as Assets is part of a special Community Catalyst initiative under the National Leadership Grant programs. For this special initiative, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is interested in supporting projects that address significant challenges and opportunities facing the library, archive, and museum (LAM) fields and that have the potential to advance theory and practice. This joint Libraries and Museums special call for proposals invites projects that will help LAMs and their communities learn together how to build upon the unique abilities of LAMs to achieve positive change. Successful projects will exemplify how LAMs can provide trusted spaces for ongoing community dialog and exploration of the intersections between individual narratives. In addition, successful projects will demonstrate the viability of using and adapting existing approaches gleaned from the collective impact, social well-being, and community development arenas. A range of approaches are currently being employed in these fields that could be helpful as potential applicants consider their proposed projects.

Priority Program Areas: I. U.S. - NEW ZEALAND (INCLUDING NIUE AND THE COOK ISLANDS) BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP Programs that seek to explain U.S. policies, culture, and values to New Zealand, Niuean or Cook Island audiences, resulting in a positive impact on the bilateral relationship. II. REGIONAL SECURITY Programs that address issues of regional security, cybersecurity, non-proliferation, and countering violent extremism, as well as exchanges that promote multilateral cooperation and enhance stability in the Asia-Pacific region. III. ECONOMIC GROWTH Programs related to promoting trade, investment, economic integration and responsible commercial development in the region. IV. PACIFIC ISSUES Programs related to addressing challenges specific to the Pacific/Oceanic region, such as maritime and polar affairs, infrastructure, educational development, health and wellness, and technology.

The New Era of University Innovation & Commercialization This panel discussion examines the future of university and business collaboration, with a focus on inclusive innovation. Thursday, April 19, 2018 from 3:30 PM to 4:45 PM (EDT) Oxford, OH

America's cultural heritage is preserved not only in libraries, museums, archives, and other community organizations, but also in all of our homes, family histories, and life stories. The Common Heritage program aims to capture this vitally important part of our country's heritage and preserve it for future generations. Common Heritage will support both the digitization of cultural heritage materials and the organization of outreach through community events that explore and interpret these materials as a window on the community's history and culture. The Common Heritage program considers a community to be a city or town (or a part of a city or town) that has been strongly shaped by geographical and historical forces. Members of the public in that community may have diverse family histories and heritage, or they may share a historical, cultural, or linguistic heritage. The program recognizes that members of the public-in partnership with libraries, museums, archives, and historical organizations-have much to contribute to the understanding of our cultural mosaic. Together, such institutions and the public can be effective partners in the appreciation and stewardship of our common heritage. The program supports events organized by community cultural institutions, which members of the public will be invited to attend. At these events experienced staff will digitize the community historical materials brought in by the public. Project staff will also record descriptive information-provided by community attendees-about the historical materials.

America's cultural heritage is preserved not only in libraries, museums, archives, and other community organizations, but also in all of our homes, family histories, and life stories. The Common Heritage program aims to capture this vitally important part of our country's heritage and preserve it for future generations. Common Heritage will support both the digitization of cultural heritage materials and the organization of outreach through community events that explore and interpret these materials as a window on the community's history and culture. The Common Heritage program considers a community to be a city or town (or a part of a city or town) that has been strongly shaped by geographical and historical forces. Members of the public in that community may have diverse family histories and heritage, or they may share a historical, cultural, or linguistic heritage. The program recognizes that members of the public-in partnership with libraries, museums, archives, and historical organizations-have much to contribute to the understanding of our cultural mosaic. Together, such institutions and the public can be effective partners in the appreciation and stewardship of our common heritage. The program supports events organized by community cultural institutions, which members of the public will be invited to attend. At these events experienced staff will digitize the community historical materials brought in by the public. Project staff will also record descriptive information-provided by community attendees-about the historical materials.