Most research in the humanities does not require much in the way of funding. Time, a basic computer, and access to a good library are frequently all that it takes to produce amazing scholarship.
Sometimes, though, more is required, or at least helpful. You might want to buy a frequently consulted book or access a database not carried by the library. While many archives are increasingly digitized, some are not, and even for those that are a trip to them is often helpful – sometimes critical – for a project. Scholarship is enhanced by the give and take of paper presentations at conferences. Money can help with research assistance of various kinds, such as gathering sources, digitizing materials, or preparing graphics. And, of course, money can buy our most valuable commodity, time.
Over the years, two trends have been pulling in opposite directions. First, universities increasingly rely on outside research funding to support their operations (Brown, for example, skims off 59.5% of many research grants for “indirect costs”) and thus like researchers who can bring in their own funding. Second, there is an increasingly small amount of government and foundation money available for humanities scholarship. Richer institutions can help to bridge this gap with internal funding directed to the humanities, but in most institutions faculty and graduate students in the humanities are left to find their own funding, and those who establish a track record doing so are valued.
As a faculty member who has been relatively successful at obtaining grants and fellowships and who has served as a reviewer on several funding committees, I was was asked to participate in a discussion hosted by Brown’s Center for Global Antiquity to introduce graduate students to the world of grants and fellowships. It was a great conversation and it helped me to gather my own thoughts. I offer them here as advice (I am addressing here as “you” a graduate student in the humanities or adjacent to it) to those who didn’t attend (and even to those who did and had to listen to me put together these thoughts on the fly):
- You will be at all kinds of advantages if you become familiar with applying for grants, so start early. Writing grant applications can take time, but it is worth seeking out and applying for small grants – whether for internal or external funds – early in your graduate degree. Seek a grant to go to a conference or buy research materials. You do not want to be applying for your first grant or fellowship when getting it is critical to your research or career.
- Know now that most of your applications will be rejected. You do not get grants unless you are rejected for grants, so you have to keep applying. In nearly every case, you will not know why your application was rejected. You may have a genuinely flawed project, or have a great project that you presented poorly. Or you simply did not rank high enough among those competing that year. Or one of the reviewers was having a bad day while reading your application. The lesson here is that much of this is luck, and the very same application that is denied one year might be accepted another year, with a different set of competitors and selection committee (this has happened to me more than once). Keep applying and be resilient!
- There are an astounding number of grantors in the world. We tend to focus on the big and well-known funders among universities, governments, and giant foundations. Many of their opportunities you will learn about through ads, listservs, and other forms of social media and targeted emails. But there are tons of private, often family, foundations. They are often lesser known, have less money to distribute, and can be quirky. Your university – either the graduate school or the division of research – has access to databases that can be used to search and sort them. You can also scour the public IRS form 990s, which most (non-religious) non-profit organizations are required to file (and which are online here). Need $500 to attend an archaeology conference? You may find it someplace you don’t expect.
- Once you settle on a grant or fellowship, read the requirements and criteria. Then reread them, again and again. I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough. Grant reviewers are often given a rubric that exactly matches the criteria listed in the public Call for Proposals. You always want to make it easy for the reviewers by carefully and explicitly signaling where you are addressing a criterion. In fact, you may find it helpful to feed both the CFP and a draft of your proposal into an AI chatbot and ask it to respond to and even score your proposal. This can give you some valuable feedback about where and how to strengthen the proposal.
- When exemplars of successful applications are available, you should consult them. Sometimes a grantor will make a few public (NEH has traditionally been very good at this). Other times, though, it may require some sleuthing. Who got the grants last year? Can you figure out what the projects are, or even reach out and request a copy of their application? Remember that they got lucky, and so there is no guarantee for you if copy their strategy. Still, though, if you have a better sense of their past funding you might be able to discern trends and preferences that will put you in a better position.
- Many grant and fellowship applications fail because applicants do not do a good enough job of explaining why their fantastic project is actually fantastic, or even interesting. Chances are that your project is not ground-breaking and its contribution will not be intuitively obvious to a reviewer who is most likely from an adjacent (or even far distant) field. It is crucial that your application and your letters of support demonstrate why your question is an important one. Some prefer to contextualize their projects in wider theoretical frameworks, while others tend toward issues of social justice. These are just two of many possibilities. It may not strike you as fair that you have to justify a project in ancient Chinese philology to a scholar in modern English, but much of life is unfair.
- I hate asking for letters of recommendation almost as much as I hate reading them. But ask you must, and you will need to find scholars at your institution and hopefully beyond who can vouch for your credibility and the importance of the project. I have written elsewhere on how I read such letters, to which I generally do not attach a lot of importance. They are a required part of nearly every application, though.
- An important question for nearly every grantor is whether the project can actually be completed, or nearly so, as proposed. Do you have the skills and languages that you need to complete the project well? Is your timeline – which we all expect to be a little optimistic – at least in the neighborhood of what is feasible? If you are “almost done” with a dissertation, be precise about what that means. Reviewers are more seasoned than applicants and recognize a larger set of barriers to a well-meaning timeline. Overpromising can be fatal.
- I mentioned using AI above. How you can or should use it is a delicate and evolving issue. Some grantors have explicit policies about whether you can use chatbots to help you compose your narratives (perhaps surprisingly, many allow this). Most still do not, though. Personally, I am of two minds on this issue. On the one hand, if you used AI to put together a budget or other technical section of a proposal, I don’t really care. On the other hand, while I recognize that a grant proposal is largely a utilitarian document (i.e., it is not the research work itself), in the humanities in particular I want to hear your unique voice. Also, writing this yourself will help you to clarify your own thinking; even if it is not successful an application can be useful. So tread carefully and deliberately.
In a field in which honest positive feedback tends to be in short supply, it is nice to get a grant, even a small one. The purpose of these thoughts was not to intimidate you but to help you position yourself for success. I volunteer for reviewing panels because I enjoy staying on top of new scholarly trends and learning new things. Apply away, and maybe I’ll be lucky enough to see one of your applications at some point!
