Membership Activity Fund
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The Membership Activity Fund is a small grant opportunity open twice a year for funding proposals from CHCI member centers and institutes. This fund supports our membership in two core goals:
Supporting inclusive collaborations among CHCI members and their partners, and
Supporting activities with outcomes that will benefit our membership.
CHCI’s definition of inclusive collaboration includes but is not limited to engaging underrepresented centers of humanistic knowledge, such as institutions without a humanities center or institute, institutions or organizations serving underrepresented populations, or institutions or organizations representing a geographical or discipline underrepresented in CHCI.
We encourage applicants to review CHCI’s mission statement here, and the current composition and activities of our membership here.
Current deadlines:
Deadline October 7, 2024, with decisions by October 25, 2024
Deadline February 7, 2025, with decisions by February 28, 2025
Application review: Applications will be reviewed by the Membership Committee of the CHCI International Advisory Board as well as by CHCI staff.
Available funding: CHCI expects to fund 5-10 requests per deadline, with most at a maximum of $5,000. For 2024, we have $35,000 available from membership dues, and we have additional funds from our Mellon Inclusive Collaborations grant.
Eligibility: The individual submitting the proposal will be from the staff of a CHCI member center or institute. The CHCI member directory can be found here. Collaborators do not have to be CHCI members: we welcome collaborators to become CHCI members, but this is not an expectation or stipulation of receiving funds.
Guidelines
You may request up to $5,000 per proposal. Requests beyond $5,000 will be considered, particularly for activities that span two cycles of the Membership Activity Fund. Those receiving more than $5,000 will be asked to wait two cycles (one year) before submitting again.
Members are welcome to submit a proposal at any time of the year, with the understanding that we will only be reviewing proposals twice per year. Please only submit one proposal for review at a time.
For our Tier 2 and 3 members (those with budgets greater than $50,000 USD), we expect but do not require a match from your institution. This match includes in-kind contributions.
We understand CHCI Networks to be a form of inclusive collaboration by their nature.
Activities can be in the form of seeding new collaborations or sustaining existing projects.
Whether or not your proposal falls under the category of inclusive collaboration, you will use the same application and guidelines to complete your proposal.
Proposals may include but are not limited to:
Leading an activity involving multiple centers
Hosting a regional or international humanities meeting
Facilitating a CHCI Network event or program
Piloting a new program or initiative involving multiple centers
Publishing the outcomes of a humanities collaboration with multiple members
Organizing a professional development opportunity for the staffs and/or constituents of multiple centers
Traveling to a CHCI-sponsored event other than CHCI’s Annual Meeting, which has its own scholarship process
Application
Please complete the application form below, which will include the following elements. If you have any questions, please contact us at info@chcinetwork.org.
Individual point ohttps://chcinetwork.org/admin/...f contact and contact information
CHCI Affiliation (Sponsoring CHCI member center or institute, or CHCI Network)
CHCI members and external collaborators involved
Activity name
Activity description (500 words max)
Budget including any matched funds or in-kind contributions (300 words max)
What is the benefit of this proposed activity to the CHCI membership? (300 words max)
What opportunities and/or outcomes will be shared with the wider membership and in what form? (300 words max)
Past Recipients
2024
- Aspirational Infrastructure Research: Mobilities, Airports, Place (AIR-MAP). Benjamin Linder, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University. Forming a cohort of junior scholars and mid-career colleagues from the Global South to participate in an interdisciplinary two-day symposium examining the politics, imaginaries, and contestations of airports in the Global South, nested within the 5th annual Global Mobility Humanities Conference (GMHC) in Seoul, South Korea.
- CHCI Public Humanities Network. Nicholas Allen, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia, USA. Supporting the Network’s pre-conference activities for the CHCI Annual Meeting 2024 and their program for the Annual Meeting itself, centering a new award in public humanities leadership.
- Collaborative Writing on Gender Activism: Transdisciplinary and Trans-hemispheric Knowledges in Movement. Stephanie Kirk, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Co-creating a bilingual publication intended as a model for the integration of a hemispheric perspective on gender activism, in partnership with international scholars and practitioners in Mexico City at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.
- Sovereign claims and counterclaims: Transdisciplinary approaches to the study of humanity’s global past. Stefan Amirell, Linnaeus University, Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Hosting a three-day cross-cultural workshop to explore the different ways in which sovereignty has been conceptualized, understood and exercised in different historical and cultural contexts, tentatively planned for October 2024, at the Swedish Institute in Istanbul.
2023
- CHCI Liberal Arts Colleges and Small Universities Network (LACSU) 2024 Conference. Christopher Grobe, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst College. Supporting LACSU’s April 25-27, 2024 conference including an access fund for underrepresented institutions and participants.
- Humanities in the Regions. Kylie Message-Jones, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. Supporting a regional Community of Practice that contributes to disadvantaged scholars, institutions, and communities across regional Australia and to make an intellectual contribution to the emerging global field of critical regionalism.
- Humanities as the Common Wealth of Kentucky (HCWK). Mary P. Sheridan, Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society, University of Louisville. Gathering humanities educators from Kentucky’s eight state universities and build productive relationships with humanities programs across the state.
- Our History of Living with Water: A Tale of Two Cities—Venice and Miami. Sara Agnelli, Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere University of Florida. Conducting a three-day center visit and workshop to Venice from April 10-12, 2024 to lay the groundwork for future collaborations and a prospective joint virtual project on the history and future of rising sea levels and environmental and cultural resilience.
- 100 Years of Citizenship: The Indian Citizenship Act (1924), Sovereignty, and Native Rights. Cristina Stanciu, Humanities Research Center, Virginia Commonwealth University. Creating an access fund for BIPOC graduate and junior faculty participation during this mid-2024 international symposium.
- CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network, ‘Creating Utopic Spaces: Interruptions, Eruptions, Disruptions.’ Maurits van Bever Donker, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Supporting a two-day workshop on utopia as a critical practice and as a propositional practice, tentatively set for September 2024.
- Transit Asia Research Network, Joyce C.H. Liu, International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Launching a new Asia-based CHCI network at the 2023 Summer Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) Institute, Decolonization in the 21st Century.
- ‘What We Brought With Us’ Exhibition, Vanessa Agnew, Academy in Exile. Touring this exhibit which shares the objects that people took with them when fleeing persecution, suffering, and war, with an accompanying symposium on art, exile, border crossing, and resilience at the University of Cincinnati’s Taft Research Center.
- Humanities as Cultural Heritage, Lee Wallace, Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), The University of Sydney. Supporting a CHCI delegation to the 21st General Assembly of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) from 4-8 September 2023.
- International Symposium on Contemporary Chinese Poetry—University of Alberta, National Taiwan University, and Ohio State Univesrity. Staging this symposium on the campus of the University of Alberta, September 15-18, 2023, organized by Christopher Lupke, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, and Mark Bender.
- Indigenous Migrations, Tourism, and Ecological Crises: Building Collaborations in Mexico, Bianet Castellanos, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota. Conducting a site visit to lay the groundwork for a project on indigenous migrations, tourism, and ecological crises in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
- CHCI Publication and Peer Review Working Group, Nicole Welk-Joerger, Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Connecting the membership of CHCI in a larger conversation about the form and function of publishing for humanities centers and institutes.