Pasts Imperfect (4.17.25)
Saving, Celebrating, and Defending the work and the workers behind the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the NEH Office of Digital Humanities (ODH)
This week, Pasts Imperfect has a special issue dedicated to supporting the work of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). News came last week that 1,434 grants supporting arts, culture, translation, digital humanities, excavation work, and museum programs across the country were cut. Dozens of NEH staff members were also put on administrative leave after DOGE associates entered their Washington, D.C. office building and locked them out of their accounts. In response to the cuts, ACLS President Joy Connolly discusses the need to band together and defend the work of the NEH and the many humanities projects it funded. Then, a list of funding stripped from digital ancient world projects, testimonials about the impact of the NEH, outlets for protesting these cuts, and new ancient world journals. Let’s get to it.
Investing in Knowledge for All by Joy Connolly
The Trump administration has devastated the National Endowment for the Humanities. At least 118 of its 180 staff members have been fired so far, and its work has ground to a halt. DOGE arrived in force to destroy an office used to doing a lot with a little. The NEH has distributed less funding in its whole lifetime – $6 billion total since 1965 – than the National Science Foundation does in a single year: its budget was $9 billion in FY2024 alone. But the cuts will affect everyone in the United States, whether or not they are aware of it today. DOGE has slid a stiletto into the heart of the notion that both science and literature are key to national flourishing, as George Washington told Congress in 1790 – or, as James Baldwin put it, that we must invest in knowledge for all, because life is more than meat.
I’m the president of one of the three organizations responsible for convincing Congress back in the 1960s to establish the NEH in the first place, along with Phi Beta Kappa and the Council for Graduate Schools. The damage I see takes three forms.
First, scholars have lost access to one of the members of the very short list of funders still funding the academic humanities. Ford, Javits, and Carnegie, to name just a few of the biggest foundations, largely abandoned grantmaking for humanists in the 2010s. Hundreds of projects will now be delayed or prevented from ever seeing the light of day, thanks to constraints on research funding and sabbatical time in institutions across the country. Beyond individual projects, because the NEH was one of the only funders committed to collaborative research, lines of communication have now been cut that linked scholars working in colleges and universities with one another and with museum staff, high school teachers, librarians, and community groups.
Second, state humanities councils stand to lose just about everything, since the cancellation of their formula grants makes it likely that many will not be able to make payroll. The whole country will lose access to knowledge that helps us understand one another and go on together in relative peace and security.
Third, the cuts erode what few tools we have left to bind us together in the spirit of self-knowledge, inclusion, and affirmation. As I wrote in the Village Voice back in 2017, the first time a Trump administration tried to kill the NEH, if we want to chart a mutually justifiable course for living together as citizens, we need knowledge and the habit of thinking. We must invest in knowledge – and make this investment a visible part of our national mission, what it means to be American.
Until now, each American taxpayer has paid about the cost of a candy bar to fund the NEH each year. For that candy bar, we benefit from projects like the Flint Neighborhood History Project in Michigan, where community organizers, university faculty, and local museum and library staff recover the vibrant past of one of Michigan’s first Black neighborhoods by gathering and digitizing documents, oral histories, and artworks. The Virginia Commonwealth University East Marshall Street Well project engages community members in thinking together about the study of nineteenth-century human remains, mostly of African descent, discovered in 1994 on the VCU campus. The members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe are revitalizing California’s Spanish colonial mission museums, starting with Mission Santa Clara, with the support of faculty at Santa Clara University. Greek Drama/Black Lives made possible a new production of Euripides’ Medea by faculty and students from the Community College of Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr College, and the E. M. Stanton School in South Philadelphia, fortifying relationships between the college and its local community.
These are four examples from among the twenty-four programs funded by the Sustaining Public Engagement Grants, a $3.5 million award from the NEH to my organization, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The production of knowledge in these programs goes hand in hand with the process of bridging divides, healing fractures, and building community where it did not flourish before. This is what public investment does. It broadcasts the message that the legacy of knowledge, whether it be of history, language, art, or science, is public property. But this administration doesn’t believe in the idea of a public. It views “public good” as an oxymoron.
What can we do in response?
Past attempts to destroy the NEH arose in Congress. Citizens could communicate with their representatives and senators, including with Republicans, among whom the agency has always enjoyed significant support. There’s no line of appeal to the nameless youths of DOGE or to the White House that directs their actions.
ACLS, in collaboration with other organizations represented on the executive committee of the board of the National Humanities Alliance, is pursuing several avenues of response, including legal ones. Financial support for this effort, when the time comes, will be one way the broader public of scholars and their allies can express support.
I hope that we, the PI community, treat this crisis as an opportunity to spread knowledge of the NEH’s achievements to people unfamiliar with them – to broaden our circles, however we can. Most Americans these days have a dim view of the nation’s colleges and universities, and regard for the academic humanities, in particular, is lower than it has ever been. If you know people who think of the academy as a privileged ivory tower or the home of woke ideology, tell them about the NEH’s commitment to knowledge as a public good. Have a conversation about how we can build community across difference, or the meaning of history to democracy, or the role of art in an age of AI. You’ll be carrying a little bit of the work the NEH has done and, I am confident, will do again.
The NEH Projects Stripped of Funding by DOGE
In 2009, the National Endowment for the Humanities created their main grants database, the Funded Projects Query Form, where you can see past grants—and the few that remain active. You can also consult the grant catalog and download data about past grants. However, the Association for Computers and the Humanities has set-up a database of terminated grants. The ACH’s co-president, Lauren Tilton, a professor of digital humanities at the University of Richmond, spoke with NPR about the wide impact of these cancelled projects which you should read prior to perusing these projects and reaching out to their PIs to see how you can support them:
Ancient World Digital Projects with NEH Funding Cut: Please consider directing web traffic, funds, time, and attention to these incredible projects, particularly since the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) has been largely dismantled. The copy below has largely been taken from the NEH grant summaries or digital project summaries.
ASCSA: The NEH Fellowship program at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens promotes and facilitates the study of the humanities in the United States by providing opportunities for American-based, post-doctoral scholars to pursue research projects in humanistic disciplines relating to Greece. Access to world-class libraries, archaeological sites, museums, storerooms, excavation records, and archival collections along with the creative and intellectual energy that results from engagement in a dynamic academic community, makes the American School an ideal place for conducting such research.
Ancient Script Digitization and Archival (ASDA) of Indus Valley Artifacts: A Tier I project to support the development of a machine learning algorithm for identifying the Indus Civilization ancient script. The proposed project in digital humanities will develop a machine learning (ML) system to automatically elicit texts and symbols from the pictures of artifacts from Indus Civilization. The ASDA system will be capable of automatically inserting these information into a database. The database will be available online and will facilitate automated statistical analyses of data by archaeologists, thus, providing scalability to research that is mostly performed manually now. The Tier-I project will be a proof-of-concept, resulting in a prototype system available online for researchers in archaeology and ML.
The Bridge: Funding for the further development of The Bridge Readability Tools platform for analyzing and teaching ancient Greek and Latin texts.
Coptic Scriptorium: This project digitizes Coptic literature and builds NLP tools for Coptic (currently Sahidic and Bohairic dialects) which were the first open source/open access NLP for any phase of the Egyptian language. Everything is OA and open source, and you can use their NLP tools online as well by pasting Coptic text into that tool’s site. Many of their digitized documents have aligned English translations, some with Arabic. Carrie Schroeder notes the needs of the project are not certain yet, but if anyone would like to donate or volunteer, they can contact her.
Digital Accessibility for Blind Scholars of Antiquity: Through the integration of high-quality, dependable braille tables into the open-source and community supported LibLouis project, this project will make sure that online text and digital editions can be accessed on the fly by refreshable braille displays. The project focuses on Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic, with special consideration to their representation in scholarly editions.
The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA): A digital humanities initiative related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. IDEA is exploring how emerging technologies can be harnessed to improve access to information across disciplinary, linguistic, and institutional silos for the (global) public good.
The Mediterranean Antiquities Provenance Research Alliance (MAPRA): A project working to establish a standard nomenclature and protocol for undertaking provenance research on Mediterranean antiquities, piloting the protocol in four university test cases, creating a website with compiled resources, and a listserv for individuals doing provenance research on Mediterranean antiquities.
MAYALEX: A Comparative Lexical Database of Early Mayan Languages: Funding was meant to allow the expansion of an existing digital infrastructure for Indo-European languages to include creation of a set of linked online etymological dictionaries for early Mayan languages.
Perseus on the Web: A project to expand data related to Greek and Latin sources that is part of the Perseus Digital Library, the largest online open-access reference collection of Greco-Roman culture and language.
Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law: Preparation for print and online publication of translations and annotation of all surviving Greek and Latin inscribed legislation from classical Rome. The project will produce the first comprehensive, accurate, scholarly, and freely-available edition of all surviving inscribed legislation from classical Rome. The corpus of Roman laws has been continually enriched through new archaeological work, and new editions have been made as the corpus has expanded. The last decades have witnessed a remarkable sequence of discoveries.
Testifying to the Impact of the NEH by Humanities Scholars
“The rhetoric around research funding implies a division of labor where researchers, of course, steer the intellectual ship and funding agencies merely support their initiatives. But that’s not always true. In the case of the interdisciplinary field called “digital humanities,” the creation of NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities (in 2008) significantly preceded wide academic enthusiasm for the topic. I doubt DH would have acquired the prominence and coherence it eventually did in North America without the work of NEH-ODH (led by Brett Bobley from 2008 through 2025). It’s not just the funding itself that mattered, but the model of evaluative rigor, care, and inclusiveness established at NEH review panels. I learned more from participating in those panels than I did from any conference.”
— Ted Underwood, Professor of Information Sciences and English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“The NEH made it possible for me to write Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton, 1994).”
—Jennifer Roberts, Professor of Classical Languages and History, The City College of New York
“An NEH Summer Stipend for summer 2024 resulted in a book proposal and sample chapters sent off to the press by end of the award period. I just signed an advanced contract for Scandalous Christian Histories with University of Edinburgh Press today because of that funding. For smaller institutions that are so teaching heavy we are reliant on these opportunities to buy us some time to focus on research which is very difficult to do during the semester.”
—Jennifer Barry, Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion at the University of Mary Washington.
“I’ve been very lucky to have been awarded several National Endowment for the Humanities grants & many of my colleagues have had them including one which was just defunded. Defunding the NEH does not just severely and negatively impact individual archaeologists the world over, a large amount of their grant money is earmarked for room & board at American overseas research institutes such as the Albright Institute in Jerusalem & the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, forming a key component of their support. The outcomes of these grants in the form of publications, public lectures, new capabilities & research networks promotes American research abroad, and enhancing America’s international reputation.”
— Louise A. Hitchcock, Independent Researcher in Aegean Archaeology
“I benefited massively from the 2023 NEH Summer Seminar on the Performance of Roman Comedy.”
— Anise K. Strong-Morse, Associate Professor of History, Western Michigan University and recent Jeopardy contestant
“We received a three year NEH grant 2014-2016 (with extensions) for "Resurrecting Early Christian Lives: Digging in Papyri in a Digital Age.” The most useful and promising development from this grant has been the creation and improvement of digital analytical tools for deciphering documentary papyri and increased ability to recognize specific scribes in literary mss. Marthot-Santanielo has accomplished the most in this area with several relevant research projects.”
—Melissa Harl Sellew, Professor Emerita of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures, University of Minnesota
“The first 3 years of my 4 years working at HMML were funded entirely by an NEH grant, allowing me to catalog around 3,000 manuscripts and helping us create haf.vhmml.org.”
—James Walters, Assistant Professor of Religion, Rochester College
“My grant for next year was just defunded. I was going to be able to write up the results of excavating a late-Roman early-byzantine cemetery from which we have isolated a complete mutated leprosy genome as well as a typhoid genome. We think we are dealing with population from a leprosarium. But without access to a wonderful non circulating archaeological library, this work will be made much more difficult and will take a lot more time (which I don’t have because I work at a SLAC).”
—Stephanie Larson, Professor of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Bucknell University
Homeric studies has benefitted mightily from the NEH. Casey Dué Hackney notes that she received funding for “Editing as a Discovery Process: Accessing centuries of scholarship in one 10th-century manuscript of the Iliad” in (2013-2016); “Who Owns the Past?” (2012-2013); and “The Oral Poetics of the Homeric Doloneia,” as co-PI with Mary Ebbott (2007-2008).
—Casey Dué Hackney, Professor and Director of Classical Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston, and co-editor of The Homer Multitext Project
“I had the tremendous good fortune to participate in an NEH Summer Seminar on History and Memory in 20th Century France in 2012. This was in Paris, the last year before Congress ended summer seminars abroad. It was life- and career-changing. In addition to the content, which transformed the way I teach 20th century European history and kick-started my own work on colonial monuments in France, the opportunity to spend six weeks with colleagues from a wide range of institutions across the country—big R1s, regional publics, minority-serving campuses, SLACs—was an invaluable and humbling education about American higher ed. Those people are now friends, collaborators, and sounding boards. One of the most important summers of my career.”
Jennifer Sessions, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia
“The NEH funded my last year of dissertation writing. And that fellowship was probably a big help in getting a post doc. In other words it launched my career. Grad fellowships haven’t been around for awhile, but this latest is gutting.”
Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, Professor of History, University of California at Santa Barbara
I have been a co-director of two National Endowment for the Humanities projects, one (with Nathalie Roy) a two-week K-12 Summer Institute in July 2024 (“The Ancient Olympics and Daily Life in Ancient Olympia: A Hands-On History”), and the other (with David Wright, Anne Mamary, and Valerie Deisinger), a 2024-2027 "Spotlight on Humanities in Higher Education" grant for “Resituating the Humanities in Place-Based Learning.” Both have been not only among the most professionally satisfying endeavors of my career, but also among the most democratically impactful. The Summer Instititute brought 26 teachers from around the nation to Monmouth College (in Illinois) to learn about hands-on approaches Classics, which the majority of those teachers have already put into action in their classes, extending the impactful learning to their thousands of students.”
—Robert Holschuh Simmons, Associate Professor and Chair, Classics Department, Monmouth College
“I am deeply indebted to the NEH for supporting the Classical Atlas Project (CAP; 1988-2000), which produced the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton, 2000). But NEH grants then later supported the development and redesign of the Pleiades Project, an important open-access digital gazetteer which provides reusable geospatial data to hundreds of projects. Richard J.A. Talbert, my PhD advisor, along with digital humanists like Tom Elliott, and a team of more than 200 other scholars helped to map the Mediterranean. But it was the NEH that then helped us to make that world free to the public. Thank you.”
—Sarah E. Bond, Erling B. "Jack" Holtsmark Associate Professor in the Classics, Department of History, University of Iowa
“A 2024-25 NEH fellowship is funding my current project: the publication of the ceramics from the excavation of the city of medieval Balis, Syria, a diverse multi-period Islamic site that was also a major center for pottery production in the middle Islamic period (11th-13th c.) The ceramics provide material evidence for the history of a globally-linked trade entrepôt and site of scholarship and pilgrimage on the Euphrates River. In 2015, during the Syrian war, the site was bulldozed during the ISIS occupation and later further damaged and looted by Iranian and Assad government forces. My NEH fellowship has also allowed me time to finalize the development of a demo for an Arabic-English handheld digital game based on our excavation of an early Islamic palatial mansion at Balis, resulting in a collaborative community heritage recovery project I am pursuing with Syrian colleagues. I am indebted to the NEH program, which has supported my scholarship but has also allowed a local community in Syria to reframe and have agency over a painful past in the aftermath of armed conflict.”
—Stephennie F. Mulder, Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin
Update: Prof. Mulder received a grant termination letter from Michael McDonald, Acting Chairman of the NEH, soon after this comment. Our hearts are with every scholar, library, museum, team, school, or excavation that received one of these letters this month—and those who won’t get the chance to benefit from this funding in the years to come. Please visit the National Humanities Alliance website for more.
New Antiquity Journal Issues (by yaleclassicslib.bsky.social)
Cahiers des études anciennes Vol. 62 (2025) #openaccess Irruption et résolution de la violence interne dans les cités grecques et romaines
Classical Antiquity Vol. 44, No. 1 (2025) NB Yukai Li, Helpless “Spectators in the Odyssey and the Cinematic Image of Time”
Eranos - Acta philologica Suecana Vol. 115 (2024–2025) #openaccess NB Leon Walsh, “Nietzsche in nuce: A note on the philologist’s 'Crux, nux, lux’“
Forum Classicum No. 4 (2024) #openaccess
Römische Mitteilungen Vol. 130 (2024) #openaccess
Sylloge epigraphica Barcinonensis (SEBarc )Vol. 21 (2023) #openaccess
Valonia: A Journal of Anatolian Pasts Vol. 1 (2024) #openacces
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 94, No. 4 (2024) Kinds of Intentionality and Kinds of Approaches to Intentionality
Journal of Indian Philosophy Vol. 53, No. 1 (2025)
The Monist Vol. 108, No. 2 (2025) The Ethics of Partiality: Ancient and Modern Perspectives.
Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales Vol. 91, No. 2 (2024) NB Irene Caiazzo “La démonologie platonicienne au Moyen Âge (de l'Antiquité tardive à la fin du XIIe siècle)”
NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion Vol. 79, No. 1 (2025) #openaccess Mobility and Identity Formation in Ancient Judaism
Numen Vol. 72, Nos. 2-3 (2025)
Hieroglyphs Vol. 2 (2024) #openaccess
Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 84, No. 1 (2025) NB Shana Zaia “Humor as “Pedagogy: Cases from Mesopotamia in the First Millennium bce”
Near Eastern Archaeology Vol. 88, No. 1 (2025)
Antiquity Vol. 99, No. 404 (2025)
Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt Vol. 54 No. 3 (2024) #openaccess
Archäologische Informationen Vol. 47 (2024) #openaccess
Oxford Journal of Archaeology Vol. 44, No. 2 (2025)
Anuario de Estudios Medievales Vol. 54 No. 2 (2024) #openaccess
Gesta Vol. 64, No. 1 (2025)
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