Seed Grants

The seed grant program supports humanities-based projects that engage with social challenges in the past, present or future. Successful projects creatively employ humanities methodologies and may have interdisciplinary components.

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Current opportunities

Apply for a seed grant through March 16!

Seed grants fund 12 months of work for an individual (up to $9,000) and ASU-based team projects (up to $12,000). Seed grants are intended to help researchers develop projects they will use as a proof of concept when applying for external grants. Recipients are required to apply for external funding within two years of the start of the seed grant.

Proposals are judged by the following criteria: a) the project’s fit to external funding sources and probability of garnering external funds, b) the project demonstrates significant need for funding, c) the project is coherent and has clearly stated achievable goals and outcomes (an applicant’s past grant or project track record is helpful but not necessary), and d) the project’s impact on scholarship and/or communities.

As a general rule, seed grants do not fund monograph projects unless there is a high likelihood of receiving support from an external funding source. Applicants considering a book project for the seed grant must consult with the Humanities Institute prior to applying or, alternatively, consider applying for a fellowship, which is designed for monograph projects.

Note that because the institute is funded foremost for humanities units and faculty, the seed grants are primarily for faculty in humanities units or humanities faculty in non-humanities units (such as art historians in a school of art or philosophers in a school of science). Faculty outside of the humanities but deploying a clear humanities methodology are encouraged to contact the Institute to discuss their projects prior to applying and/or work with a humanities faculty member for a team seed grant.

Apply for a Humanities Institute seed grant

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Apply for a Humanities Institute-Herberger Institute seed grant

Review Humanities Institute-Herberger Institute guidelines

Submit proposals for The Roots of the Americas: Multidisciplinary Histories of New World Plants

Julia Sarreal, principal investigator of the spring 2025 seed grant Planting the Americas, is seeking abstracts for her upcoming workshop, which seeks to bring together historians and historically-minded scholars whose work focuses on the relevance of native plants of the Americas, ranging from the pre-Columbian era to the present. Contributions from the fields of natural history, the history of science and medicine, environmental history, food history, ethnohistory, cultural history, anthropology, cultural studies, ethnobotany, and plant humanities are welcome. Paper proposals offering historical studies of less documented North and South American plants are particularly encouraged.

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Current seed grant projects

2025

Spring

Creative Civics: Artists, Artmaking, and Cross-sector Collaboration

Artists have long worked outside of formal arts spaces, making the process of collaboration within health, transportation, government, and other sectors central to artmaking.

Health Humanities and María Luisa Puga’s Diary of Pain

Ilana Luna (ASU) and Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell) will co-translate and critically introduce the work Diary of Pain by Mexican author, María Luisa Puga.

Hemispheric Afro/Indigeneities

The dispossession of Indigenous land and the transatlantic slave trade were the foundational processes for the nation states that emerged throughout the western hemisphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Human Rights/Human Rites a multimedia exhibition and related cultural programming

Much of the social justice discourse surrounding refugees focuses on violations that occur in lawless regions or under repressive regimes. However, refugees endure systemic oppression and violence both during their journeys and within the countries they seek to make their home.

Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and the American Southwest: Indigeneity, Ritual, Immersive Environments

This project involves organizing a conference, entitled “Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and the American Southwest: Indigeneity, Ritual, Immersive Environments,” to be held at ASU in November 2025, with a subsequent plan for an edit

The RetroTech Archive Project

The RetroTech Archive (RTA) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project designed to develop both a physical-digital archive and a research program on retro computing software and technology from the 1980s to early 2000s.

The Rhetoric of Online Scams

This project applies rhetorical theory to the issue of online scams, focusing on ethos, trust, and persuasive argumentation.

Fall

Editing Emerson's Natural History of Intellect

“Editing Emerson's Natural History of Intellect” will be the first reliable scholarly edition of Natural History of Intellect, the last lecture series by Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet (1803-82).

Engaging Banned Books: Cultivating Civically Engaged Literacies with Arizona English Teachers in Censored Times

“Engaging Banned Books: Cultivating Civically Engaged Literacies with Arizona English Teachers in Censored Times” investigates how Arizona English language arts teachers are navigating increasing legislative pressures to remove diverse books from classrooms.

Planting the Histories of the Americas

“Planting the Histories of the Americas” brings together historically-minded scholars focusing on the history of native plants of the Americas from the pre-Columbian era to the present.

Soundscape Imaginaries: Exploring across Multispecies Boundaries

“Soundscape Imaginaries: Exploring across Multispecies Boundaries” investigates how creative responses to field recording generate ecological imagination and multispecies awareness.

Testimony as Resistance: Leonard Peltier, Indigenous Storywork and Intergenerational Trauma

“Testimony as Resistance: Leonard Peltier, Indigenous Storywork and Intergenerational Trauma” investigates how oral testimonies of Indigenous activists transmit collective memory and intergenerational trauma, with Leonard Peltier serving as a central case study.

The Clute Science Fiction Library: A Partnership for Preservation, Access, and Visibility

The Clute Science Fiction Library at the Telluride Institute in Telluride, Colorado, in partnership with Arizona State University, aims to preserve and enhance a unique archive of 14,000 first-edition science fiction books.

Unearthing the Literary Archives of Russia’s Brontë Sisters: The Poetry of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya

“Unearthing the Literary Archives of Russia’s Brontë Sisters: The Poetry of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya” will scan, transcribe and publish digitally about 200 poems, with translations into English of selected poems, by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821-89), located in two notebooks in the Russian State