Humanities Seed Grants

The Humanities Seed Grants support faculty members interested in producing innovative public-oriented research. In the process, we aim to help Stanford scholars develop a new and uniquely Stanford approach to the humanities and so to set a new standard for humanities research.

The humanities comprise those fields that study the many ways humans make meaning in their lives, individually and together. Humanists examine the stories we tell, the histories that have shaped our lives, and the cultures within which we live. They work in and across a wide variety of fields, from English and History to Music and Art, and sometimes too in Law and Education and the qualitative social sciences. They are uniquely responsible for helping students and the public wrestle with difficult questions of meaning, interpretation, and value so as to imagine new futures and build full and satisfying lives.

In keeping with Stanford’s university-wide focus on helping students and the public at large reimagine the human future, we are seeking to fund projects that innovate by, among other possibilities:

• Collaborating to build new intellectual networks, answer new questions, or reach across existing fields to bring humanistic skills to bear on pressing social and environmental questions;
• Engaging with students and the wider community, including local, national, and international publics;
• Magnifying impact within and beyond particular scholarly fields through either the scale and scope of questions posed or the research design and methodology;
• Offering new outcomes of research beyond the traditional scholarly monograph, such as productions, podcasts, documentaries, and exhibitions.