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Grants for Humanities Research

Learn about grants for humanities research by exploring the curated list of top humanities funders below. Members can also research funding opportunities using the search tool for GrantFinder. Become a member.

Key Humanities Funders

Trends in Humanities Funding

Grants for humanities research reflect a small slice of total philanthropic giving. As the humanities come under fire in the U.S., research funding seems increasingly out of reach.

The history of the humanities, often a highly debated area of study unto itself, entails arguments not only with regard to what counts as the study of humanism, but also speaks to concerns such as a lack of perceived diversity, not only in what is studied, but who gets to study it.

While there is a distinction between the social sciences, which seek to define issues more quantitatively, and the humanities, which questions issues in qualitative terms, funding for the humanities often includes both.

Today, the humanities, according to the National Humanities Center, include “the study of history, philosophy and religion, modern and ancient languages and literatures, fine and performing arts, media and cultural studies, and other fields,” such as anthropology and even the social sciences.

General grantmaking for the humanities

Institutional funding makes up the bulk of philanthropy in the humanities research space, with a particular emphasis on art history and conservation, as well as on fellowships. Anthropology, which most believe belongs to both science and the humanities, also receives foundation grants.

Many college and university performing arts programs and conservatories likewise rely on philanthropy for some of their funding. 

For the most part, funders do not have specific humanities programs, but some exceptions exist. A handful of major foundations— as well as state and federal funders — have dedicated programs focused on the humanities. Some of this kind of funding is laser-focused on a particular aspect of humanities research, while other grants are more general and inclusive in scope.

Historic scarcity of humanities funding

While humanities research funding has long been considered scarce, scholar today identify the lack of available humanities research funding as a crisis.

Even before the draconian federal funding cuts of 2025, several major sources of funding for the humanities had already ceased to exist. As Asheesh Kapur Siddique reflects in an 2023 article for Inside Higher Ed, several “longstanding fellowships that provided general public or private support for doctoral education in the humanities have also been discontinued,” such as the Javits Fellowship, which ended in 2011, as well as “the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (1993–2006), and the Ford Foundation Fellowship (1967-2022).”

Public funding for humanities research

In contrast to STEM fields and the natural sciences, the humanities have received scant public funding for years. Now, the longtime leading public funder of the humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, is threatened with drastic diminishment. Other federal agencies that have provided additional funding for the humanities (as described by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) –  including the Department of Education, the National Park Service, and the State Department – are also experiencing severe funding cuts if not outright dismantling. 

Colleges and universities, as well as individual scholars, have competed with museums, art conservation nonprofits, and humanities research institutions, among others, for funding to support travel, archival work, fellowships, dissertations, early-career work and research at large, among other needs. Now all of these entities are scrambling to find private funders to replace government grants. In contrast to STEM fields and the natural sciences, the humanities have not kept up public funding models for humanities research. With the exception of a handful of previous major public funders like the National Endowment of the Humanities, public funding for the humanities lags behind that of other fields despite an increase in enrollment across humanities departments in the U.S.

As the Federation of State Humanities Councils’ site attests, humanities councils and forums exist in almost every state in the U.S. They provide important funding at the state-level for the humanities.

Recent humanities funding trends

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences identifies an array of humanities funding and research opportunities that have existed at the state, federal, private and not-for-profit levels. Acknowledging a lack of national data tracking philanthropic giving for humanities in particular, the Academy found that in 2023, combined giving for “the broader category of arts, culture, and humanities” accounted for 4.5% of all charitable giving. Giving to this broad category was generally on the rise from 2011 to 2023, the Academy reports. But in 2025, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and other federal agencies that have historically supported humanities research have been abruptly cut, while some entire agencies that made humanities grants are threatened with dissolution. 

The question now is: what will philanthropy do in light of the Trump funding cuts to the humanities? 

An initial response came from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest private humanities grantmaker, which pledged $15 million in spring 2025 to provide emergency funding to the Federation of State Humanities Councils to preserve state-level humanities programs in the face of federal funding cuts. But the Mellon Foundation’s emergency funding is more distinctive than representative because Mellon, “a bellwether humanities grantmaker, is one of the few major funders that has publicly drawn a direct line between two numbers — the amount of federal dollars not flowing to organizations (in this one case, $65 million) and the amount of emergency funding going out the door ($15 million) to partially close the gap,” IP’s Mike Scutari wrote. 

It remains to be seen what — and how much — other private funders will do to fill the enormous gaps created by federal abandonment of humanities research funding. Inside Philanthropy will follow funders’ moves in our ongoing coverage of philanthropy for arts and culture and higher education. 

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