NEH Announces $37.5 Million in Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded $37.5 million in grants for 240 humanities projects. Funds will support the publication of 25 nonfiction titles as well as research into the implications of AI.

Through its Public Scholars program, the agency awarded $1.4 million to support the publication of 25 new nonfiction books. Among the titles it will support are a biography of the Chinese American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, often called the “Chinese Marie Curie,” and a book about the life of Warder Cresson, the first American diplomat to Jerusalem and a Pennsylvania-born Quaker who was tried for insanity after his conversion to Judaism in the 1840s. Other book projects involve the making of George Cukor’s 1939 movie The Women, the first Hollywood film to feature an all-female cast; and examine the history of the Imperial Sugar Company and its connections to the city of Sugar Land and the Texas Penitentiary System.

This round also included the first grants in NEH’s new Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence program, which supports the creation of humanities-based centers focusing on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI. The program, part of NEH’s ongoing research initiative, Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, which supports humanities projects that explore the impacts of AI-related technologies on truth, trust, and democracy; safety and security; and privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. Five colleges and universities in California, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Virginia received the first grants in this program to create new hubs of scholarship and learning that will provide a more holistic understanding of AI in the modern world, the NEH said.