Funding Sources for Humanities Scholars

Are you looking for additional support for your work? The list below is updated on an ongoing basis, if you are aware of other funding sources please let us know at collaboratory@umich.edu.

§ Key Resource
Foundation Relations provides proposal development resources to faculty and staff. Updated weekly, their website includes curated upcoming funding opportunities, insights and advice for applying to specific foundations, commonly required documents for foundation proposals, and annotated sample proposals. Foundation Relations “connects you to grant opportunities from the nation’s largest foundations, covering natural and medical sciences, healthcare and health policy, poverty, sustainability, engineering, social sciences research, arts and humanities. We know many of these funders well, and we provide extra insight to help you submit the strongest proposal possible.”

§ Internal

Michigan Humanities Award (MHA)
Applicants must be LSA tenured, full-time faculty engaged in major scholarly and creative projects in the humanities and social sciences. This program provides a scholarly activity leave for one term with salary.

Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant
This grant is designed to support Rackham graduate students who need assistance to carry out research that advances their progress toward their degree.

Institute for the Humanities Fellowships
The Institute for the Humanities funds faculty fellowships, graduate student fellowships, and mini-grants in support of interdisciplinary projects with a public component.

LSA Gateway Research Funding
The LSA Gateway page on research funding includes links to information on the following: internal LSA programs; LSA/UMOR faculty grants and awards; Rackham funding; UMOR funding, finding funding; and more.

LSA Humanities Faculty Assistance

The LSA Research Office provides a valuable resource helping faculty develop a plan to move their research project forward for funding, both external and internal. Ben Friedline and Steve Beach (lsaresearchoffice@umich.edu) are available to work with any LSA humanities faculty member and their departmental research administration structure to:

  • help to find Sponsors external to UM;

  • use eGIF for internal funding;

  • edit your project proposal prior to submission;

  • provide access to successful examples of funded projects;

  • connect you with departmental Research Administrators who can help you with your budget, provide a checklist of sponsor requirements, and assist with routing your proposal for University approvals (ie PAF process).

Please feel free to contact the LSA Research Office if you want to talk more about a project you are working on. They are happy to work with you whether you are already working on a grant proposal or whether you are in the very first stages of a project idea and aren’t sure what funding sources might be available.

TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)
This program supports open access to peer-reviewed digital monographs that are free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. Instructional/Research Faculty, Librarians, Curators, and Archivists are eligible. Lecturers and postdocs are not currently eligible.

Advance Succeed
This program supports tenure-track and tenured faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences with career needs (e.g., research travel, childcare during research travel, book editing, professional development such as workshops, and supplies).

Associate Professor Support Fund
Available through the LSA Gateway:
Research>Funding>Internal LSA Programs
This program supports LSA associate professors to help them prepare for promotion to full professor. In the humanities, this program supports summer ninths, course “buy downs,” GSRAs, editing/translation work, or funds to travel to a distant site.

Tips and Insights on External Grants and Fellowships
This workshop held February 9, 2022 featured a panel with several LSA humanities faculty members who have successfully applied for external funding to support their research. The funding portfolio of these panelists included, for example, support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Luce Foundation. Links to a recording of the event and the powerpoint slides that were shared are available.

§ External

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
NEH provides opportunities for research grants including Collaborative Research, Digital Humanities, Digital Projects for the Public, Documenting Endangered Languages, Bridging Cultures through Film and many more. The scope of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) support “includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: history; philosophy; languages; linguistics; literature; archaeology; jurisprudence; the history, theory, and criticism of the arts; ethics; comparative religion; and those aspects of the social sciences that employ historical or philosophical approaches.”

NEH Funding Opportunities Flyer
Reference guide generated by the LSA Research Office summarizing NEH funding opportunities. The list is a helpful compilation of NEH opportunities classified by type and including fellowships; infrastructure, preservation, and public access projects; digital and media projects; and education and training projects. Each opportunity includes links, maximum award amounts, deadlines, and success rates.

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
The University can nominate two faculty members for these fellowships providing $6,000 in the form of salary support. Prospective applicants should find the opportunity in U-M’s InfoReady system to apply for consideration.

National Humanities Center Fellowship
The National Humanities Center annually offers up to 40 residential fellowships for advanced study in the humanities. Applicants must have a doctorate or equivalent scholarly credentials. Mid-career scholars as well as senior scholars are encouraged to apply. Emerging scholars with a strong record of peer-reviewed work may also apply. The Center does not normally support the revision of a doctoral dissertation.

Humanities Without Walls
An extensive consortium of fifteen humanities institutes in the Midwest funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities Without Walls aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation.

Cullman Center Fellowships
The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library is an international fellowship program open to people whose work will benefit directly from access to the research collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building—including academics, independent scholars, and creative writers (novelists, playwrights, poets). The Center appoints 15 Fellows a year for a nine-month term at the Library, from September through May.

IRH Fellowships at University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) at University of Wisconsin-Madison awards stipendiary and non-stipendiary honorary fellowships to internal and external applicants each year. The fellowships are open to applicants in any discipline or field whose project has clear significance for the humanities. Fellowships are awarded at all faculty ranks and to independent scholars, based on the significance of proposed research, the record and potential of applicants, and the promise of interdisciplinary engagement in the IRH intellectual community.