Ruth Alden Doan Assistant Professor of History Christopher Florio has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend award of $6,000 to support his project, “The Problem of Poverty in the Anglo-American Age of Slave Emancipation, 1780-1865.”
Florio, a member of the Hollins faculty since 2019, is writing a book on responses to poverty across the Anglo-American world in the wake of slave emancipation. The book traces the historical relationship between slavery’s abolition and the emergent forms of racialized and global inequality that began to coalesce in slavery’s wake.
The NEH Summer Stipends program aims to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication. The program works to accomplish this goal by:
- Providing small awards to individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.
- Supporting projects at any stage of development, but especially early-stage research and late-stage writing in which small awards are most effective.
- Funding a wide range of individuals, including independent scholars, community college faculty, and non-teaching staff at universities.
Summer Stipends support continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months. NEH funds may support recipients’ compensation, travel, and other costs related to the proposed scholarly research. In the last five cycles, this nationally competitive program received an average of 812 applications per year. It has only an 11% funding ratio with the NEH making an average of 90 awards per year. The maximum individual award amount is $6,000.
Overall, the NEH announced more than $35 million in grants this month for humanities projects throughout the country. “These 258 newly funded projects demonstrate the vitality of the humanities across our nation,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “NEH is proud to support exemplary education, preservation, media, research, and infrastructure projects that expand resources for Americans, support humanities programs and opportunities for underserved students and communities, and deepen our understanding of our history, culture, and society.”
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
