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ANALYSIS: NEH awarded $2.4M in DEI grants to professors and universities right before Trump’s crackdown on ‘wasteful’ programs

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded nearly $2.4 million in diversity, equity, and inclusion-related grants to higher education institutions, including one for a book about LGBTQ+ cartoonists and another to study “feminist mapping,” a College Fix analysis found.

The federal agency, which provides grants for humanities projects, announced via news release Jan. 14 that it would award “$22.6 million in grants for 219 humanities projects across the country,” including to museums, libraries, cultural organizations, and universities.

Of the grants given to professors or higher education institutions, a College Fix analysis identified 35 related to DEI issues, including climate change, race, and gender. The total amount of grant funding awarded to these projects was over $2.38 million.

The grant announcement came less than a week before President Donald Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20. Soon afterward, the Republican leader issued an executive order to end “wasteful government DEI programs.” The order is being challenged in court.

The NEH did not respond to multiple emails from The Fix asking if any of the grants in the Jan. 14 announcement had been put on hold by the Trump administration.

One grant awards $60,000 to Margaret Galvan, a professor in University of Florida’s English department, for “a book on the comic formats innovated by LGBTQ+ cartoonists in the 1980s and 1990s,” according to The Fix’s analysis.

“By making available comics that have been buried for decades, this project excavates stories of vibrant queer communities to inspire a new generation at a time when LGBTQ+ people face renewed threats,” the grant description states.

Nicole Jenkins, a professor of sociology and criminology at Howard University, also received a $60,000 grant for “a study about race, class, and gender dynamics of African American hair salons in Vegas.”

Syracuse University Professor Meghan Kelly received $74,725 for a project titled “Feminist Mapping.” The project is described as “an empirical study investigating alternative map icons, a conference on map symbolization and innovative mapping tools, and creation of a research agenda that re-envisions conventional map icon libraries.”

“Given their size and ubiquity, map icons are often overlooked and applied universally in maps despite reflecting cultural contexts and power relations,” according to Kelly’s grant description. “I am applying for a [grant] to reconceptualize map icons as sites and their libraries as tools for feminist resistance.”

The Fix received no responses from Galvan, Jenkins, or Kelly to multiple emails asking for more details about their projects as well as the possibility of the funding being cut by the Trump administration.

The Fix also reached out to Kara Schlichting, recipient of a $40,000 grant for “a book on the historical and structural bases of climate inequalities among New York City residents and neighborhoods,” but she declined to comment due to being “absolutely buried this term.” She is a historian at Queens College in New York City.

Louis Galarowicz, a spokesperson for the National Association of Scholars, said it’s likely that even more of the grants “are critical or social justice related, though the description might not make it perfectly obvious.”

“DEI is a common framework for scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences. Many grant award committees either implicitly or explicitly encourage grant applicants to explain the relationship of their work to DEI,” he told The Fix in a recent email.

“Accordingly, grant applicants with varying levels of personal commitment adopt the language and framework of DEI in designing their projects and pitching their proposals,” Galarowicz said.

Other projects on the NEH list include a book titled “Black, Brown and Green” by environmental studies Professor Brian McCammack at Lake Forest College.

The book will be “a collective biography examining the experiences and perspectives of environmentalists of color who attempted to build a racially diverse environmental movement,” according to the grant announcement.

“Environmental justice histories tend to begin in the 1980s, and most of the histories of the mainstream environmental movement tend to leave out people of color or ignore their multiple responses to the mainstream movement in late ’60s and early ’70s,” McCammack stated in a news release from the college.

Another grant funds “a book on how mid-twentieth century space exploration was made possible through extensive physical infrastructure constructed in developing countries” by history Professor Asif Siddiqi at Fordham University.

“It argues that space activities during the Cold War … masked and excused a host of practices that were extensions and reformulations of older colonial practices, including forced displacements of indigenous populations, environmental damage, illegal occupations, resource extractions, and exploitative market forces,” the grant description states.

Neither McCammack nor Siddiqi responded to several emails from The Fix asking for comment.

Past grants awarded by the NEH also have drawn criticism for being “highly ideological” and “progressive,” as The Fix previously reported.

In a report last year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute pointed to a $270,000 grant from 2022 to create classes about “Latinx history, hip-hop, and contemporary Filipino American art.”

MORE: UMaine loses, regains nearly $30 million in USDA funds over Title IX investigation

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: An image of American currency with DEI imagery atop it; Dmitry Demidovich/Shutterstock

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