• Elliott Antokoletz Fund - For research in 20th-century music
• M. Elizabeth C. Barlet Fund - For research in France
• Virginia and George Bozarth Fund - For research in Austria
• H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Fund - For research based on the musical press
• Jan LaRue Travel Fund - For European research
• Janet Levy Fund - Research support for those without access to employer-based research funding 
• Harold Powers World Travel Fund - For research throughout the world
• Ora Frishberg Saloman Fund - For musicological research
• Eugene K. Wolf Travel Fund - For European research

BBVA Foundation

Frontiers of Knowledge Awards
FAS/OSP Deadline: not required for grants awarded directly to individuals
Sponsor Nomination Deadline: June 30, 2021
Award Amount: 400,000 euros, a diploma, and a commemorative artwork

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognize fundamental contributions in a broad array of areas of scientific knowledge, technology, humanities, and artistic creation. The disciplines and domains of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards are:

• Basic Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics)
• Biology and Biomedicine
• Information and Communication Technologies
• Ecology and Conservation Biology
• Climate Change
• Economics, Finance and Management
• Humanities
• Music and Opera

Any scientific or cultural organization or institution may nominate more than one candidate, but no candidate may be nominated in more than one award category. The awards are also open to scientific or cultural organizations that can be collectively credited with exceptional contributions. Candidates may be of any nationality. Self-nomination is not permitted.

• Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship
• Caleb Loring, Jr. Fellowship
• American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship
• American Congregational Association-Boston Athenæum Fellowship
• Mudge Teacher Fellowship
• Boston Athenæum Community Fellowship

Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices is a national grant competition administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for digitizing rare and unique content stewarded by collecting organizations in the US and Canada. In 2021, the call for applications will focus on projects that propose to digitize materials that deepen public understanding of the histories of people of color and other communities and populations whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or unattended. The program coheres around five core values:

• Public Knowledge: The program fuels the creation and dissemination of digitized special collections and archives as a public good. 
• Broad Representation: The program supports digitization projects that will thoughtfully capture and share the untapped stories of people, communities, and populations who are underrepresented in digital collections in ways that contribute to a more complete understanding of human history.
• Authentic Partnerships: The program prioritizes projects that foreground meaningful engagement with the underserved communities whose stories the source materials tell, and that build inclusive teams across institutional and geographic boundaries.
• Sustainable Infrastructures: The program promotes forward-thinking strategies ensuring the long-term availability, discoverability, and interconnectedness of digitized content.
• Community-Centered Access: The program advocates for approaches to access, description, and outreach that make digitized content as widely available and useful as possible within legal and ethical constraints, centering digital inclusion and respect for materials’ local contexts.

• Aid worthy students of music to secure complete and adequate musical education
• Aid organizations in their efforts to present fine music to the public, provided that such organizations are operated exclusively for educational purposes

• Support technical preservation training and educational efforts for the public sector as well as for educational institutions and non-profit organizations based in the United States

• Continue a successful tradition of partnering with educational institutions and non-profit organizations to deliver technical preservation training

• Continue to provide high-quality and focused symposia and conferences on topics timely to the technical preservation community

• Extend HPEF’s experience and organizational stability to support new and unique training opportunities undertaken in the United States

Applicants are encouraged to team with secondary organizations, including other public, private and non-profit organizations, if this supports the primary goals of the proposal. HPEF encourages and supports training projects that demonstrate efforts to address issues of social justice and inclusion.

The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects at different stages of their lifecycles, from early start-up phases through implementation and sustainability.  Experimentation, reuse, and extensibility are valued in this program, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The program also supports scholarship that examines the history, criticism, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society. Proposals are welcome in any area of the humanities from organizations of all types and sizes. 

In support of its efforts to advance digital infrastructures and initiatives in libraries and archives, and subject to the availability of funds and IMLS discretion, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) anticipates providing funding through this program. These funds may support some DHAG projects that further the IMLS mission to advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations. IMLS funding will encourage innovative collaborations between library and archives professionals, humanities professionals, and relevant public communities that advance preservation of, access to, and public engagement with digital collections and services to empower community learning, foster civic cohesion, and strengthen knowledge networks. This could include collaborations with community-based archives, community-driven efforts, and institutions or initiatives representing the traditionally underserved. Interested applicants should also refer to the current IMLS Strategic Plan for additional context. 

NEH Fellowships are competitive awards granted to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing. Applications must clearly articulate a project’s value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.

Fellowships provide recipients time to conduct research or to produce books, monographs, peer-reviewed articles, e-books, digital materials, translations with annotations or a critical apparatus, or critical editions resulting from previous research.  Projects may be at any stage of development.

Through NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication, the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation jointly support individual scholars pursuing interpretive research projects that require digital expression and digital publication. To be considered under this opportunity, an applicant’s plans for digital publication must be integral to the project’s research goals. That is, the project must be conceived as digital because the research topics being addressed and methods applied demand presentation beyond traditional print publication. Competitive submissions embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clearly articulate a project’s value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.

All projects must be interpretive. That is, projects must advance a scholarly argument through digital means and tools. Stand-alone databases, documentary films, podcasts, and other projects that lack an explicit interpretive argument are not eligible.

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 awards are made to organizations that offer national, regional, or statewide education and training programs across the pedagogical landscape and at all stages of development, from early curriculum development to advanced implementation. Awards help the staff of cultural institutions, large and small, obtain the knowledge and skills needed to serve as effective stewards of humanities collections. Awards support projects that prepare the next generation of preservation professionals, as well as projects that introduce heritage practitioners to new information and advances in preservation and access practices.

The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Stipends program aims to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication. The program works to accomplish this goal by:

• Providing small awards to individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both
• Supporting projects at any stage of development, but especially early-stage research and late-stage writing in which small awards are most effective
• Furthering the NEH’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in the humanities by encouraging applications from independent scholars and faculty at Hispanic Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and community colleges

Summer Stipends support continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months. NEH funds may support recipients’ compensation, travel, and other costs related to the proposed scholarly research. The NEH will host a webinar on the Summer Stipends program on April 14th; a direct link to view the webinar can be found on the page here. An additional previous webinar on application writing tips can be viewed here. 

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), with funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks proposals for its new program for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History. With an overarching goal to broaden participation in the production and publication of historical and scholarly digital editions, the Start-Up grants program is designed to:

• Provide opportunities that augment the preparation and training of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) new to the work of historical documentary editing, especially those currently working in history or related area and ethnic studies departments.
• Encourage and support the innovative and collaborative re-thinking of the historical and scholarly digital edition itself—how it is conceived, whose voices it centers, and for what purposes.
• Encourage and support the early planning and development of significant, innovative, and well-conceived digital edition projects rooted in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American history and ethnic studies.
• Stimulate meaningful, mutually beneficial, and respectful collaborations that help to bridge longstanding institutional inequalities by promoting resource sharing and capacity building at all levels, and that build into their plans a variety of means for achieving meaningful community and user input and engagement.

Grants are awarded to collaborative teams consisting of at least two scholar-editors, as well as one or more archivists, digital scholars, data curators, and/or other support and technical staff, as appropriate to fulfill the planning goals and early-implementation needs of the proposed edition. NHPRC strongly encourages applications from collaborative teams that include BIPOC faculty and staff in key positions, and that include editorial, archival, and technical staff at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges, and/or other Indigenous and Native American tribal scholars and community members, and members of the Asian American community. NHPRC also encourages projects to seek out community members as well as undergraduate and graduate students to contribute to (and benefit from) participation in all phases of the project.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks proposals to publish documentary editions of historical records. The NHPRC especially welcomes projects that focus on broad historical movements in U.S. history, such as law (including the social and cultural history of the law), politics, social reform, business, military, the arts, and other aspects of the national experience, including any aspect of African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American history. Projects may also center on the papers of major figures from American history.

The Commission is especially interested in projects to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The NHPRC encourages applications that use collections to examine the ideals behind the founding of the United States and the continual interpretation and debate over those ideals over the past 250 years. The NHPRC welcomes projects that engage the public, expand civic education, and promote understanding of the nation’s history, democracy, and culture from the founding era to the present day.

The Linguistics Program supports basic science in the domain of human language, encompassing investigations of the grammatical properties of individual human languages, and of natural language in general. Research areas include syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology. The program encourages projects that are interdisciplinary in methodological or theoretical perspective, and that address questions that cross disciplinary boundaries, such as (but not limited to):

• What are the psychological processes involved in the production, perception, and comprehension of language?
• What are the computational properties of language and/or the language processor that make fluent production, incremental comprehension or rapid learning possible?
• How do the acoustic and physiological properties of speech inform our theories of natural language and/or language processing?
• What role does human neurobiology play in shaping the various grammatical properties of language? 
• How does language develop in natural learning contexts across the life-span?
• What social and cultural factors underlie language variation and change?

Because NSF's mandate is to support basic research, the Linguistics Program does not fund research that takes as its primary goal improved clinical practice or applied policy, nor does it support work to develop or assess pedagogical methods or tools for language instruction. Proposals for conferences are also accepted. 

Art Seeking Understanding (ASU) is a program strategy concerned with improving the methods of inquiry into the existence and nature of what Sir John Templeton called spiritual realities. ASU begins with aesthetic cognitivism, a theory about the value of the arts that approaches them not simply (or not even) as sources of delight, amusement, pleasure, or emotional catharsis but, instead, as sources of understanding.

• But is there an empirically demonstrable connection between art and understanding vis à vis what Sir John referred to as spiritual reality and/or spiritual information in particular?
• And if so, what distinctive cognitive value does engagement with the arts (production and/or consumption) generate?
• Under what conditions and in what ways does participation in artistic activities encourage or stimulate spiritual understanding, insight, or growth (meaning- or sense-making)?

Projects in this area would bring together writers, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, filmmakers – artists of all kinds – as well as art historians and musicologists with philosophers, theologians, and scientists from a variety of sub-disciplines within the psychological, cognitive, and social sciences to conceive and design empirical and statistical studies of the cognitive significance of the arts with respect to spiritual realities and the discovery of new spiritual information.

Proposals for the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship should be far enough into development or execution to present specific, compelling evidence that they will successfully engage the intended public. Strong proposals will show evidence of both the overall strategy and the practical plan to implement the proposed project. Relationships with key collaborators should already be deeply developed, and, in some cases, the nominee and collaborators may have tested the idea in a pilot, or the project itself may already be underway. Nominees may propose to direct funds however will best meet the needs of the project. Funding may not be used to cover indirect costs of administering the program. The Foundation anticipates awarding up to seven Fellowships in this cycle.