Faculty Grants & Funding

There are many funding opportunities for faculty members involved in Digital Humanities projects. Below, you will find several grants and funding opportunities specifically for Bucknell humanities faculty as well as a list of external DH funding opportunities. To search for more specific kinds of funding that may pertain to your project (including regional grants), please visit Bucknell University’s Pivot portal.

Visit the Office of Sponsored Projects at Bucknell for further information and additional resources, including sample grant applications.


Grants for Bucknell Faculty

Bucknell Humanities Center Fellowships and Grants

The Bucknell University Humanities Center provides several fellowship and grant opportunities for faculty studying and working in the humanities. Opportunities include high-impact teaching grants, fellowships to enable collaborations between faculty and students, and faculty research fellowships. These opportunities are made possible through the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President’s Office. For more information about these grants and fellowships, please visit the Humanities Center Fellowship and Grant Opportunities website.

Curricular and Instructional Development Grant

The Curricular and Instructional Development grants are intended to support projects to develop teaching and the curriculum by faculty in tenured/tenure-track and continuing positions. The committee encourages applications for the development of the curriculum in response to major
changes in a discipline or to changes in enrollment patterns within the University. Proposals aimed at developing new pedagogies are encouraged. For more information, visit the Faculty Development Opportunity webpage.

L&IT Digital Research Assistant Micro-Grants

L&IT Digital Research Assistant grants provide support for faculty-student digital scholarship projects across disciplines during the academic year. These micro-grants can provide seed money or bridge funding to encourage ongoing work on digital scholarship projects during the academic year. Proposals should focus on a faculty member’s professional research; student participants should engage in digital forms of analysis and/or publication that contribute to this larger research project. For more information, visit the L&IT Digital Research Assistant Micro-Grant website.

L&IT Summer Research Grant

Library & Information Technology Summer Research Grants support faculty interested in utilizing digital tools and methods to further their research. These grants are aligned with the University’s digital scholarship initiative, whereby research is enhanced, extended, or reconsidered through application of technology and furthers the goal of engaging students in digital scholarship outside of the classroom. Proposals should focus on a faculty member’s professional research; student participants should engage in digital forms of analysis and/or publication that contribute to the larger research project. For more information, visit the L&IT Summer Research Grant website.

Mellon Confounding Problems Grants

Confounding (or wicked) problems are large-scale problems that resist any simple solution — and that concern us as citizens as well as scholars. The expression has been used primarily in the sciences and social sciences to describe problems or issues that have multiple causes and no single answers, such as a quick technological fix or a central authority to solve them. Confounding Problems Grants assist faculty in developing curricula and pursuing research related to these problems. Confounding Problems Grants are supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information about the available Confounding Problems Grant opportunities, please visit the Mellon Confounding Problems Grants website.

Scholarly Development Grant

These grants are intended primarily to support the scholarly and professional development of faculty in tenured/tenure-track and continuing positions. Grant recipients are expected to commit themselves to their project for a minimum of two months of the summer. For more information, visit the Faculty Development Opportunity webpage.


External Fellowships and Grants for Digital Humanities Projects

ACLS Digital Extension Grants

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and related social sciences. It is hoped that these grants will help advance humanistic scholarship by enhancing established digital projects, extending their reach to new communities of users, and supporting teams of scholars at all career stages as they participate in digital research projects. Visit the ACLS Digital Extension Grants website.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan’s programs in Digital Technology explore how the internet and computing technology are creating new opportunities to empower the scientific enterprise and expand the public’s access to knowledge. Visit the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation website.

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation regularly offers grant opportunities related to Digital Humanities infrastructure, support, and development. Past examples of such opportunities include the Scholarly Communications program, which assisted research libraries, archives, museums, universities, presses, and arts organizations to realize the potential of digital technologies in furthering the collective understanding of societies and cultures around the world; and social media preservation efforts. To search for Mellon Foundation grant opportunities, visit the Mellon Grants Database.

CLIR: Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives

Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials is a national grant competition administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for digitizing rare and unique content in collecting institutions. Visit the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives website.

NEH Office of Digital Humanities

The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) offers grant programs that fund project teams developing new technologies for humanities research, teaching and learning, public engagement, open access publishing, as well as for those studying digital culture from a humanistic perspective. Another major goal of ODH is to increase capacity of the humanities field, interpreted broadly, in applying digital methods. Visit the NEH Office of Digital Humanities website.