Many sources of DH project funding are available from outside of the university. For information about DH at Berkeley’s grant offerings, please see our programs page.
Please note that several of these projects require a data management plan and/or a discussion of project sustainability. To develop a strong proposal, we encourage you to get in touch with DH at Berkeley staff and utilize our grant preparation support as early as possible. Please also allow for 5 business days prior for processing time with UC Berkeley’s Sponsored Projects Office. When preparing a budget, note that these grants are subject to the university’s current indirect cost rate.
If you have a funding opportunity you would like to share with us, please email us at digitalhumanities@berkeley.edu. Join our mailing list to receive information about additional opportunities for funding, training, and conference travel.
Helpful resources:
- Technical Evaluation for Digital Humanities Projects
- Grant preparation support
- Resource guides and blog posts from DH at Berkeley on project development
Funding Opportunities by Deadline
Digital Extension Grants
American Council of Learned Societies
Deadline: early February
Awards: up to $150,000 over 12 to 18 months
The ACLS Digital Extension Grant program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and related social sciences. It is hoped that these grants will help advance the digital transformation of humanities scholarship by extending the reach of existing digital projects to new communities of users. Funding may support a range of project costs, including, where necessary, salary replacement for faculty or staff; software; equipment; travel; or consultant fees. Institutional indirect costs will not be covered. ACLS grants may not support creative works (e.g., novels or films), textbooks, straightforward translations, or purely pedagogical projects.
Digital Humanities Implementation Grants
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) - Office of Digital Humanities (ODH)
Deadline: mid-February
Awards: $100,000 to $325,000 over one to three years
The Digital Humanities Implementation Grants program seeks to identify projects that have successfully completed their start-up phase and are well positioned to have a major impact. A sustainability plan and data management plan are required. In its first three competitions the Digital Humanities Implementation Grants program received an average of 68 applications per year. The program made an average of seven awards per year, for a funding ratio of 10 percent.
Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) - Office of Digital Humanities (ODH)
Deadline: mid-March
Awards: $50,000 to $250,000 over one to three years
These NEH grants support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. The projects may be a single opportunity or offered multiple times to different audiences. Institutes may be as short as a few days and held at multiple locations or as long as six weeks at a single site. In the last five competitions the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program received an average of fourteen applications per year. The program made an average of five awards per year, for a funding ratio of 36 percent.
Digital Projects for the Public
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) - Division for Public Programs
Deadline: early-June
Awards: up to $30,000 (for Discovery grants), up to $100,000 (for Prototyping grants), and up to $400,000 (for Production grants), over a period of one to three years
Digital Projects for the Public grants support projects that significantly contribute to the public’s engagement with the humanities. The program offers three levels of support for digital projects: grants for Discovery projects (early-stage planning work), Prototyping projects (proof-of-concept development work), and Production projects (end-stage production and distribution work). While projects can take many forms, shapes, and sizes, your request should be for an exclusively digital project or for a digital component of a larger project. In its initial competition the Digital Projects for the Public program received 64 applications and made six awards, for a funding ratio of 9 percent.
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) - Office of Digital Humanities (ODH)
Deadline: mid-September
Awards: Level I - $5,000 to $40,000, Level II - $40,001 to $75,000 for up to eighteen months
The Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program awards relatively small grants to support the planning stages of digital projects that promise to benefit the humanities. The program supports both new projects in early stages of development and efforts to reinvigorate existing or dormant projects in innovative ways. Experimentation, reuse, and extensibility are hallmarks of this grant category, which incorporates the “high risk/high reward” paradigm often used by funding agencies in the sciences. A data management plan is required. In its first three competitions the Digital Humanities Implementation Grants program received an average of 68 applications per year. The program made an average of seven awards per year, for a funding ratio of 10 percent.
Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources
Council on Library and Information Resources
Deadline: mid to late September
For the purpose of this fellowship, “original source” means an original version of a “primary source,” as opposed to a surrogate. Original sources may include born-digital sources such as databases, websites, wikis, and blogs. In 2015, CLIR awarded 15 fellowships.
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Council on Library and Information Resources
Deadline: late December
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows work on projects that forge and strengthen connections among library collections, educational technologies, and current research. The program offers recent PhD graduates the chance to help develop research tools, resources, and services while exploring new career opportunities. Host institutions benefit from fellows' field-specific expertise by gaining insights into their collections' potential uses and users, scholarly information behaviors, and current teaching and learning practices within particular disciplines. In 2015, CLIR awarded 14 fellowships.
Institutions interested in hosting fellows will pay a portion of the Fellows’ salary, while CLIR will pay for a portion of salary, training, and travel costs.