Funding Opportunities
The CHR welcomes opportunities to partner with scholars and researchers across Mason. These partnerships happen both through research fellowships and grant-funded humanities projects. The CHR supports the humanities and humanities-related research of faculty and doctoral students in the form of semester-long residential fellowships, and also offer competitive summer research grants (dependent on funding availability).
The CHR can also be an active partner or research hub for researchers submitting and carrying out grant projects. These projects can take several forms, including public humanities projects, funding for institutes and conferences, and collaborative publications. Such work —collaborative and public-facing – is central to the CHR and empowers humanities faculty to increase the scope of their projects.
Collaborative work can be daunting to some humanities scholars, who are primarily trained to write single authored articles and monographs and whose most legitimate output is often seen as scholarly writing. But as the CHR has shown through our grant-funded public humanities projects, there's a real value to this kind of work on multiple registers. By pursuing grant projects, humanities scholars make their work more visible and connect to different audiences, building bridges from the university to the community. Such projects also advance social justice goals by working with local grassroots organizations while simultaneously opening opportunities for your undergraduate and graduate students to do community-engaged research – opportunities that can lead to internships and employment for them.
Here's how the CHR can help: The CHR partners with scholars to help find grants, apply for them, and manage projects. In the past, CHR leaders have served as PIs. The CHR can also provide support in preparing applications, writing, and coordinating research teams. CHR leaders have also served as project managers, helping to build budgets, organize teams and meetings, and sustaining momentum and energy.
Why be a PI on a humanities grant? First and foremost, grant projects expand the work Mason scholars are already doing. CHR partners with researchers to amplify their research agendas while allowing them to broaden the scope through a support team and intellectual cohort – grants can also include a GRA for faculty. Additionally, in some departments, revised tenure and promotion guidelines now reflect a commitment to collaborative grant projects. These grants projects and applications will also appear on researchers' CV and are taken into account during the annual review process—even if the grant proposals aren't ultimately funded.