Internal Limited-Submission Deadline: Friday, August 24, 2018 by 5:00 p.m.

APPLICATIONS ARE INVITED FOR THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES SUMMER STIPEND PROGRAM FOR SUMMER 2019. Successful applicants typically receive an outright award of $6,000 to support two continuous months of research and writing. Recipients must work full-time on their projects for these two months, and may hold other research grants supporting the same project during this time. (NEH Summer Stipends do not require cost sharing and do not include indirect costs.)

Summer Stipends support individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. Recipients usually produce articles, monographs, books, digital materials, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, and other scholarly resources. Summer Stipends are awarded to individual scholars; organizations are not eligible to apply. The NEH will post updated guidelines for this program within two months of this year’s NEH deadline of September 26, 2018. Those guidelines, along with FAQs, application materials, and sample application narratives will be available at the NEH website. 

Full-time faculty applicants must be nominated to the NEH by their home institutions, and only two nominations (at any rank) may be made to the NEH by each university. If you are a full-time faculty member, please DO NOT submit an application directly to the NEH; you must apply first to the internal Urbana campus competition (procedures below), and only if you are selected as a campus nominee, can you proceed to apply to NEH.

INTERNAL APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

One digital copy of the application, consisting of:

1. a project narrative (prepared exactly according to the NEH guidelines, and not to exceed three single-spaced pages);
2. a 1-page bibliography; and
3. a CV of no more than two single-spaced pages (prepared according to NEH guidelines)

must be submitted to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, August 24, 2018. Send all materials as one Word attachment to iprh@illinois.edu. IPRH will review the submissions—with an ad hoc review panel—and make the nominations in early September 2018.

N.B.: While letters of recommendation are not required for the internal campus competition, they are part of the NEH application. As the turnaround time for submission to NEH after the campus selection is complete is quite brief (nominees applications are due to NEH on September 26, 2018), IPRH recommends applicants apprise their potential referees of their interest in applying to NEH prior to the internal campus deadline.

Once the NEH makes available its guidelines for the Summer 2019 competition, further information will be made available on the IPRH website. Meantime, previous application guidelines on both the IPRH website and on the NEH’s Summer Stipends page can be consulted to gauge what is involved in assembling an application.

Please be aware, also, that the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, through the Office of Research Advising and Project Development (RAPD), offers summer proposal writing groups for those preparing applications for the fall. They are also glad to meet individually and/or provide feedback on drafts via email. Interested parties may contact Maria Gillombardo, Research Development Manager - RAPD, at gillomba@illinois.edu.

For more information about the NEH Summer Stipends, please contact Nancy Castro at ncastro@illinois.edu or 244-7913.