‘It just gets worse and worse’: Humanities at Princeton reels from NEH funding cuts

History professor Divya Cherian was at home looking after her son in late December 2024 when she received news of a National Endowment for the Humanities award. The $60,000 grant from the federal agency would have funded her second book project, “Conjured States: Witchcraft and Politics in Western India, 1750-1900,” and ensured that she could take a full academic year for her sabbatical leave while maintaining her salary.

One day three months later, she saw a flood of social media posts from fellow NEH recipients announcing that their grants had been canceled — and she began to panic, thinking her grant “would be the first to get canceled,” she told The Daily Princetonian.

Shortly after, when she checked her junk mail, there was the notification that her grant had been terminated.

Cherian was one of over 1,200 researchers across the United States whose NEH grants were suspended on April 2, 2025, and one of nine Princeton researchers who spoke with the ‘Prince.’ One year after the cancellations, these researchers have had to adapt both their research methods and how they attain funding.

Furthermore, they have expressed doubt and concern about Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget, which plans to permanently dismantle the NEH.

The terminations came as a result of realigned priorities for the agency under the Trump administration, which issued executive orders in January 2025 for “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” 

Simultaneously, 80 percent of NEH staff were laid off.

Founded in 1965, the NEH remains the only federal agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities. It has awarded over $6 billion in grants since its inception, supporting over 600 projects at Princeton, according to the official NEH award search website.

The mass termination email came only a day after University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 sent a letter to the University entitled “Suspension of many federal grants and our response,” in which he cited dozens of Princeton research grant suspensions from the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Department of Defense.

On receiving the notification of her grant cancellation, Cherian remembered, “I didn’t know whether it was frustrating or impressive that the email came from a non-government [sender]. It was just some casual email address.”

The sender was acting chair of the NEH Michael McDonald, who was deposed in January as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Historical Association, and Modern Language Association against the federal government.

Alexandra Levy, the director of communications and public affairs at the American Historical Association, which comprises a membership of over 10,000 historians, spoke to the ‘Prince’ about the role of the association in the lawsuit. It took issue with the government’s characterization of humanities research as intrinsically connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks.

“African American history is not DEI. The history of LGBTQ+ people, that’s not DEI,” Levy said. “It’s just history. And that has been one of the most disconcerting things, is to see what is just good evidence-based history distorted as DEI.”

The Princeton research projects terminated under the NEH’s new standards range from the mining economy in the American West to the development of paper in Mexico and African stories about the Virgin Mary. Professor Wendy Laura Belcher, who is jointly appointed in comparative literature and African American studies, received two major NEH grants in August 2021 totaling over $600,000 to translate and digitize African stories about the Virgin Mary. As the funds were dispersed in multiple installments, Belcher ultimately lost approximately $30,000 between the two grants.

Echoing Levy, Belcher noted, “It struck me that this is … about Christianity and the Virgin Mary and Africa. How is this DEI? Just because it’s about Black people?”

The NEH’s standards for what constituted DEI were largely defined by ChatGPT, which the Department of Government Efficiency employees used to evaluate which research projects fell outside of Trump’s “America First” agenda.

“The DOGE employees … fed the NEH project descriptions into ChatGPT and asked ChatGPT to say whether the project was DEI or not. It did not define what DEI was,” Levy explained. 

History professor Corinna Zeltsman, whose research focus is modern Latin America, saw her grant cancellation as inevitable. “I research the history of Mexico, and in a hypernationalistic context of humanity, that wouldn’t even get funded as a priority to begin with,” she said. “I would not even expect that my research would be considered under a politicized NEH.”

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson — a 78-year project that has wholly centered the documents of the founding father — is one of the only Princeton-affiliated humanities projects still receiving funding from the agency. The Papers is a partner in the collaborative North American Climate History project, which did experience an NEH grant termination. “The cutting of that grant has been a setback for the NACH effort, but has not affected our work on the Jefferson edition,” said the project’s general editor James McClure.

Some with canceled grants said that the cuts did not significantly impact their research.  Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Acting Chair of the Humanities Council Christina Lee GS ’99 was already near completion of her project on an ancient convent in the Philippines by April 2025.

Alongside assistance from the Humanities Council, Lee said, “My department stepped in, and they helped me with a fund. I used some of my personal research funds to be able to get us to the end of the project.”

Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History Marina Rustow, who also runs the Princeton Geniza project, also used several thousands of dollars to support her research after her NEH grant cancellation. “If I went to a conference, or if I bought books or whatever, I was paying for it out of my own pocket,” she told the ‘Prince.’ “I didn’t have the normal research money that professors always have to buy the things that they [need] or to go to places they need.”

Art and archaeology professor Monica Bravo was able to use the Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund, a University endowment specifically for research in the history of photography, to continue work for her book project.

“I’m really grateful to my predecessors who had the foresight to establish that research endowment and to have stewarded it so well over the past decades,” Bravo noted.

“Financially, it wasn’t a huge blow. Just morally,” said Leigh Anne Lieberman GS ’18, a digital projects specialist in art and archaeology, referring to the termination of the NEH grant for her project “Networking Archaeological Data and Communities.” However, Lieberman received another grant in August 2025, after the initial round of suspensions. 

Though the humanities funding losses were relatively minor for Princeton researchers, they unanimously shared unease regarding the grant application process going forward.

“One of my largest concerns is about self-censorship, about people proposing research projects in ways that whitewash or minimize the complicated identity politics of existing applications,” Bravo said.

“You [used to be able to] trust that there are scholars making decisions about funding projects. And I don’t think that we trust that anymore,” Zeltsman, a past reviewer of NEH grants, noted. “Using AI to identify keywords that shouldn’t be funded … that’s not the scholarly peer-review process that the NEH used to be known for.”

Limitations on this federal funding source also directly impact the ability for faculty to take sabbatical leave. Professor Molly Greene GS ’93, who holds a joint appointment in history and Hellenic studies, explained the process: “After every third year, the University pays for a semester of leave with the expectation and the hope that you will get outside funding so that you can (a), take the whole year [off] and (b), for the University to say, ‘Their work is competitive.’”

Cherian’s canceled NEH funding was substituted with funding from the History department, allowing her to take the full 2025–26 academic year off and pursue her research. However, Greene was uncertain that the internal funding option would remain sustainable.

“[The history department] is relatively wealthy, but even then, we’ve been told — with the austerity plans — that we’re expected to continue to cut our budget for an undetermined length of time,” Greene said, citing budget cuts that have affected departments across the University. “I very much doubt how things are going to work if our faculty are generally unable to take their full sabbatical every fourth year, particularly for people just beginning their careers.”

Belcher spoke to the continuity of the NEH’s support of large-scale, long-term humanities research, noting, “We have digital copies of [manuscripts] because the NEH, in the ’70s, funded people to go to Ethiopia and microfilm manuscripts in churches and monasteries.”

That continuity has now been severed. “The grants that got canceled [mean] that in 40 or 50 years, people won’t have what they might’ve had to do this really important work,” Belcher said.

Several researchers emphasized the significance of the NEH in fostering collaborative research projects, which are unusual in the humanities.

“In the humanities, traditionally, we don’t work in groups,” Lee told the ‘Prince.’ “But NEH funds, in the past, they encouraged collaboration, which could be quite productive in the humanities.”

Rustow characterized the Geniza lab similarly, stating, “My innovation in this whole operation is to realize this has to be collaborative work, because otherwise it’s just not going to get done.” The Cairo Geniza stores roughly 400,000 fragments and documents. “We want a lab the way scientists have labs, but we want a lab that’s devoted to these documents in particular.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration aims to pivot the NEH’s funds to a sculpture garden celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and an arch in his honor, reserving $17 million and $15 million of the agency’s funds for the projects respectively.

“There’s some case to be made that if it’s national money, it should support national topics,” Zeltsman offered. “But I really don’t think that that’s the kind of thought process that has underpinned the American university.”

Trump’s plan to provide “$38 million to conduct an orderly shutdown of the Agency” was specified as early as May 2025 in the NEH’s FY2026 budget proposal, and remains in the FY2027 budget proposal announced earlier this month.

While the proposal is yet to pass through Congress, Lee wrote to the ‘Prince,’ “It pains me to even imagine this historically generous resource disappearing.” Greene agreed, stating, “It just gets worse and worse … Even if Congress acts to save the NEH, I doubt that its budget will actually grow.”

“Should they succeed in shutting down the NEH, Donald Trump and this Republican administration will be bitterly remembered for setting research back centuries,” Belcher said.

Characterizing these changes as a “destruction,” Belcher added, “A long time ago, there were the iconoclasts, a religious group that didn’t believe that things should be needed, and they destroyed a lot of buildings and icons.”

“So here we are,” she said, “We have the modern iconoclast.”

Haeon Lee is the associate News editor for the ‘Prince’ leading research coverage. She is from Brooklyn, N.Y. and often covers campus research and academic departments. She can be reached at hl1389[at]princeton.edu.

Luke Grippo contributed reporting.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.