Grants & External Funding

External Funding

The Humanities Center's Role

Planning and Mission:
The SU Humanities Center’s mission is to prioritize public engagement in the humanities, understood broadly, and to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship in and across traditional and new fields of inquiry. Support for the Center comes from various sources, including the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor, which links humanities faculties from the region’s AAU universities (Cornell University, University of Rochester, and SU).  Consequently, from the very beginning, the hallmark of the Center is “connectivity,” creating links between multiple perspectives and communities, developing interdisciplinary collaborations across units, and supporting transdisciplinary initiatives that have no natural disciplinary home.  Connectivity also refers to the digital arena, the fact that the Humanities Center is being designed from its inception to achieve its programmatic and research goals by reaching out to communities (on and off campus, regionally, nationally, internationally, across disciplines) electronically and virtually.  The Humanities Center will also foster an environment that generates questions and new ideas about how to innovate and transform current humanistic inquiry and practice.  This focus may include collaborations with disciplines with different methods and approaches; experimenting with the formats through which humanistic research is typically made, taught, and disseminated (i.e., the academic conference, the referred journal, using technology in the classroom); bringing together local, regional, national, and international viewpoints on a given problem; and offering opportunities to support and train scholars in emergent areas integral to interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry, theory, and practice (i.e., internal and external non-teaching fellowships, workshops on grant writing, new media, etc.).

Grant Seeking and Grant Writing: Resources for Faculty
Procuring external sources of funding plays a role in the Humanities Center’s success in two important ways.  First, by augmenting internal resources with external funds, the Humanities Center can expand and, at the same time, increase the visibility of its research initiatives.  Second, and equally important, the Humanities Center plans to offer faculty resources and support for developing successful proposals at all levels.  These include:

  • Offering regular workshops on grant seeking and grant writing targeted to specific academic fields in or related to the interdisciplinary humanities
  • Helping to build collaborations and establishing ‘expert lists’ for proposals
  • Amassing an online database of RFPs and grant resources
  • Offering sponsorship for proposals
  • Providing physical space, including meeting and reception space, for funded efforts
  • Assisting in relationship development with SU foundation relations, OSP, and other universities for multi-institutional proposals
  • Help with grant writing (and specific proposal components i.e., evaluation plan)
  • Networking and bringing together donors with relevant project initiatives
  • Developing collaborative and individual research initiatives


Client-Based Model of Grants Support:
The ethos of the Humanities Center is connectivity—the intellectual interchange that extends beyond university walls, creates links between multiple perspectives and communities, develops interdisciplinary collaborations across units, and supports transdisciplinary initiatives that have no natural disciplinary home.  From this ethos of connectivity, the Humanities Center works hard to develop lasting relationships with multiple clients: working collaboratively with faculty to offer grant seeking resources and facilitating collaborations across disciplines and with members of the Syracuse University and broader CNY community; and establishing academic-community partnerships with various engaged communities in CNY and beyond.  Seeking external funding plays a role in the Humanities Center in multiple ways: it augments internal resources to strengthen research initiatives, and it expands the communities linked to the Humanities Center by offering support for developing successful proposals and projects.  Ultimately, in a challenging fiscal climate for all academic research, the impetus is upon us to proactively seek funding resources outside the university and to build vibrant collaborative partnerships to do so.

Submitted Grants 2008-2010

8 October 2008: NEH/IMLS Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants Program: Syracuse University (SU) Humanities Center: Digitizing Humanistic Practices, Transforming Culture
Collaborators: Department of Design/Museum Studies Program Coordinator, College of Visual and Performing Arts; Cogburn, School of Information Studies, SU Humanities Center, Slought Foundation/Slought Publications, Philadelphia, Special Collections Research Center, SU Library
Abstract: The goal of the SU Humanities Center Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up Project, Digitizing Humanistic Practices, Transforming Culture is twofold: first, to create an interactive virtual environment that encourages new practices of humanistic inquiry; second, to establish a working group composed of scholars, researchers, archivists, and expert practitioners to disseminate these new practices, in particular, their potential for initiating academic culture transformation in the humanities. These new humanistic practices include: new relationships with digital units (online texts, images, multimedia and archived products); new kinds of exchanges and forms of sociability; new community partnerships and activisms based around humanistic ideas and collections; and new forms of writing, teaching, and research dissemination that emerge from IT-cultural heritage partnerships and its cyber-infrastructure. Work products will be: the creation of a white paper resulting from the above activities and a more fully-developed proposal that encompasses some of the objectives below.

13 November 2008: NEH-Emerging Questions: “What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person?” Multi-Perspectivism on 21st Century American Life
Collaborators: SU Humanities Center, Imagining America, Cultural Foundations of Education-School of Education
Abstract: This collaborative course between Cultural Foundations of Education, the Imagining America Project, and the Humanities Center at Syracuse University, “What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person?” asks undergraduates to probe the question, what constitutes the educated person in American life today, from multiple perspectives. Does this person need to know—or have a perspective on—key historical events like slavery? Must they have an understanding and opinion on current defining events, such as 9/11 and terrorism? Do they have special capacities gleaned from both inside and outside the formal academic classroom, such as intellectual excellence, critical thinking skills, moral reflection, but also “street smarts,” cultural knowledge, and learning that comes from hands-on experience? Must they have experienced perspectives very different from their own? And is a facility with new media technologies (whether Web 2.0 user-contributed content technologies or online databases) becoming a prerequisite for being an educated person today?

2 March 2009: University of Chicago “Science of Virtue” LOI/Proposal Query: Sustainability as a Modern Virtue: Engineering Education as Case Study in Environmental Sustainability
Collaborators: LC Smith College of Engineering, SU Humanities Center
Abstract: This interdisciplinary collaboration between humanists (in philosophy, cultural studies, and religion), environmental policy and advocacy specialists, and environmental engineers facilitates an interdisciplinary conversation about the meaning of sustainability for different academic fields. Our ultimate goal is to find a common language, instead of a definitive metrics, that derives from both the humanities and the sciences. We seek to develop a methodology of ethical exploration specific to the matter of sustainability—not one borrowed from conventional disciplines.

10 February 2009: Metanexus Global Network Initiative Catalyst Grant Program: “The Religion, Science, and Humanities Forum (RSHF)”
Collaborators: Hendricks Chapel Syracuse University, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, InterFaith Works of Central New York, Mind Body Health Alliance of Central New York, Carl Rosenzweig, PhD, Dept. of Physics, Syracuse University, Marnie Blount-Gowan, CNY Mind Body Health Alliance
Abstract: The RSHF brings together scholars and interested members of the community to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue, study, and collaboration related to theology, the natural and social sciences, and the humanities. The primary interest of the group is to consider the intersection of religion and science as it impacts the environment, health, behavior, and society. This collaborative effort is based on a desire to transcend conventional boundaries in the search for wisdom, productive conversation, and effective, educational programs. The RSH Forum supports and promotes regular meetings of a discussion group and sponsors educational programs and seminars that involve, inform, and benefit scholars, professionals, students, and the public.

Précis Doc for download