The National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) has awarded $75.1 million to 84 projects, marking its first round of grants since President Donald Trump dismissed nearly all members of the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory body that helps set NEH funding priorities, last fall.
The funded projects span a wide range of subject matter but largely reflect the Trump administration’s emphasis on American exceptionalism. Grants exceeding $1 million were awarded primarily to universities for programming focused on civics and Greek classical philosophy. The largest awards—$10 million each—went to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE).
UT Austin, whose leadership was replaced this year with a former Republican lawyer, has largely acceded to the Trump administration’s push for a conservative overhaul of its curriculum. The university will use the federal grants to hire 16 faculty members to establish “academic majors in Strategy and Statecraft and Great Books— an umbrella term that references canonical texts in the Western academic tradition and recurs in descriptions for grants to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of South Carolina.
FEHE—a grant-making body headquartered at a conservative think tank in Princeton, New Jersey—will receive $10 million to develop humanities programs for research universities and provide professional development for faculty and students. The NEH has also awarded more than $2 million to the conservative-aligned Abigail Adams Institute, near Harvard University, for seminars and fellowships focused on “themes of history, literature, philosophy, and civics.”
Grand Central Atelier, a small art school in Queens, New York that promotes “art untouched by modernism” and teaches methods “rooted in traditions pre-dating the 19th century and the advent of photography,” was awarded $2 million. Its founder, the realist painter Jacob Collins, has publicly criticized modernism and avant garde art, including at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, in September. Collins describes himself on his website as a “leading figure in the contemporary revival of classical painting.”
Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution received $2.2 million—the largest grant awarded to a museum. The institution drew scrutiny in 2023 for hosting an event for the far-right organization Moms For Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as opposing “inclusive curriculum, LGBTQ rights and what they see as inappropriate reading material in classrooms and libraries.” The funded museum projects focus on US history or commemorate the nation’s upcoming semiquincentennial, with individual awards of roughly $100,000.
A handful of grants totaling about $350,000 each were also awarded for conservation, mostly focused on mentoring students in the subjects. Grantees include New York University, the University of Delaware, Minneapolis’s Midwest Art Conservation Center, Philadelphia’s Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, and the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts.
The full list of NEH grant awardees can be found here.
