UMBC is proud of our faculty’s strong trajectory of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the rigorous and impactful research and scholarship that has been supported by these prestigious fellowships and awards.
According to the National Endowment for the Humanities, NEH Fellowships are competitive awards granted to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing. NEH’s Fellowships program was established over 50 years ago and was the first award offered by the Endowment. Since then, approximately seven thousand books have been written by NEH fellows.
In the academic world, “getting an NEH” is a shorthand for receiving an NEH Fellowship, which indicates the award’s widely respected reputation and prestige. NEH’s Summer Stipends program similarly aims to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication, especially early-stage research and late-stage writing.
Since 2010, UMBC faculty have received nine highly competitive NEH Fellowships, Summer Stipends, and other awards – including four Fellowships in the past five years alone.
2024
Noor Zaidi, Department of History, NEH Fellowship to support her book, Translations of Zaynab: Gender, Sectarianism, and Citizenship in Shi’a Islam
2023
G. Derek Musgrove, Department of History, NEH Fellowship to support his book, “We Must Take to the Streets Again:” The Black Power Resurgence in Conservative America, 1980–1997
Elizabeth Patton, Department of Media & Communication Studies, NEH Fellowship to support her book, Representation as a Form of Resistance: Documenting African American Spaces of Leisure during the Jim Crow Era
2022
Elizabeth Patton, Department of Media & Communication Studies, NEH Summer Stipend to research the history of Black leisure and tourism in the U.S. to support her book, Representation as a Form of Resistance: Documenting African-American Spaces of Leisure during the Jim Crow Era
2020
Anne Rubin, Department of History, NEH Fellowship to research food scarcity in the Confederate South to support her book, Confederate Hunger: Food and Famine in the Civil War South, 1861-1867
2019
Susan McDonough, Department of History, NEH Fellowship to support her book, Bodies of Knowledge: Prostitution, Migration, and the Medieval Mediterranean
2017
Whitney Schwab, Department of Philosophy, NEH Fellowship to support his book, The Origin of the Concept of Knowledge, on the origins of philosophical study of knowledge in the Western tradition
2016
The Dresher Center for the Humanities and Jessica Berman, Department of English, NEH Humanities in the Public Square award, as part of the collaborative and multi-institutional project, “Baltimore Stories: Narratives and the Life of an American City (Baltimore Stories),” led by the University of Maryland
2010
Dawn Biehler, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, NEH Summer Stipend to support her book, Pests and the People: An Environmental History of Animals, Chemicals, and Health in the Home