NEH Fellowships are competitive awards granted to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing. Applications must clearly articulate a project’s value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.
Fellowships provide recipients time to conduct research or to produce books, monographs, peer-reviewed articles, e-books, born-digital materials, translations with annotations or a critical apparatus, or critical editions resulting from previous research. Projects may be at any stage of development.
NEH encourages submissions from independent scholars and junior scholars.
The 2026 Fellowships competition will only accept projects for research in American history and culture and Western civilization. Competitive applications must focus on topics in the history, culture, and government of the United States in any period from the Colonial Era to the present, or topics in Western civilization from antiquity to the present.
Fellowships