Funding: Digital Extension Grants (ACLS)

Dealdine for Applications: November 30, 2017

ACLS invites applications for the ACLS Digital Extension Grant Program, made possible by the generous assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This 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 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.

This program aims to extend the opportunity to participate in the digital transformation of humanistic inquiry to a greater number of humanities scholars. To this end, projects supported by ACLS Digital Extension Grants may:

  • Develop new systems of making existing digital resources available to broader audiences and/or scholars from diverse institutions
  • Extend existing digital projects and resources with content that adds diversity or interdisciplinary reach
  • Foster new team-based collaborations between scholars at all career stages. Projects that convene, train, and empower communities of humanities faculty and/or graduate students around established digital research projects, as well as projects that allow scholars from institutions with limited digital infrastructure to exploit digital resources or to participate in existing labs or working groups, are especially welcome
  • Create new forms and sites for scholarly engagement with the digital humanities. Projects that document and recognize participant engagement are strongly encouraged.

ACLS will award up to five Digital Extension Grants in this competition year. Each grant provides funding of up to $125,000 to support a range of project costs, including, where necessary, salary replacement for faculty or staff, software, equipment, travel, project related convenings, and consultant fees. ACLS especially welcomes projects that demonstrate concrete plans to extend their reach through developing new collaborations with partners at different institutions and/or engaging in community building activities with scholars at all career stages from US higher education institutions of diverse profiles; such projects are eligible for maximum funding of up to $150,000. Allocation of funds between collaboration and basic project costs may be determined by the applicant (see “Budgeting for New Collaborations” below).

Applicants must list current and past funding sources for their projects; in the case of joint funding sources for the project, applicants should indicate clearly in their budget plans how each source of project funding will be used during the ACLS grant period.

ACLS grants do not support projects whose focus is the production of creative works (e.g., novels or films), textbooks, straightforward translations, or purely pedagogical projects. Institutional indirect costs will not be covered.

For more information, and to apply, click here.