Humanities Initiatives at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Humanities Initiatives are intended to strengthen and enrich humanities education and scholarship at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. These grants may be used to enhance the humanities content of existing programs, develop new programs, or lay the foundation for more extensive endeavors in the future. Each project must be organized around a core topic or set of themes. Humanities Initiatives may: create opportunities for faculty members to study together while improving their capacity to teach the humanities; help faculty and administration develop new humanities programs, which may include but are not limited to writing programs, foreign language programs, new humanities minors, first-year seminars, capstone courses, or summer bridge programs for at-risk high school students; help institutions take advantage of underused humanities resources, especially in the digital humanities; enhance or develop areas of basic need in an institution’s core humanities programs; build ties among faculty at more than one institution of higher learning, among college teachers, secondary school teachers, and students, or among faculty members at institutions of higher learning and their colleagues in museums, libraries, or other organizations such as historical and cultural societies. Support is available for two types of projects: Faculty Humanities Initiatives and Institutional Grants for Core Humanities. Since they have different goals and outcomes, applicants should choose carefully the type of grant most appropriate for their proposed project. Faculty Humanities Initiatives typically bring together faculty within an institution or from cooperating schools, colleges, and universities to engage in study designed to strengthen their capacity to teach the humanities. Institutional Grants for Core Humanities support projects that expand or improve an institution’s core humanities education programs.