Princeton professors awarded NEH grants months after lawsuit

Two Princeton University professors and a former professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary were awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in July. The new $41.4 million wave of humanities funding follows a legal battle regarding the future of federal support for the humanities. 

In 2025, more than 1,400 NEH grants were terminated, including funding for Princeton researchers. In May 2026, a federal judge ruled that the NEH’s termination of these grants was unconstitutional, mandating that the agency rescind the terminations. It remains unclear when the grants will be distributed. 

The awards given out this July are among the first NEH grants issued since that ruling.

Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies Eve Krakowski is one of the grant recipients at the University. She was awarded a $300,000 grant for research into how people handled death as told through the Cairo Geniza, a collection of texts from the Mediterranean spanning the sixth century to the 19th century.

For Krakowski, the award means being able to support herself while she takes a leave to work on her third book and to hire a graduate research assistant. She told The Daily Princetonian that, to her, the importance of what she does lies in how humanities’ research builds upon itself to construct a window into a past world. 

“Making sources available that are not otherwise available, that were not previously available, is the engine on which the humanities runs,” Krakowski said. “This particular project, to me, the study of the social history of death is one of these core windows onto the past, onto how different historical societies have experienced, constructed, and understood a universal aspect of human experience.”

Marina Rustow, professor of Near Eastern studies and history, had her previous NEH grant for her research on the Cairo Geniza terminated last year. Rustow and Krakowski decided to apply for two separate NEH grants, despite being skeptical that they would both be awarded due to the similarities between the two projects. To their surprise, the federal agency granted both. 

“We kind of looked at each other — should we really both be applying for this, because our field, our topic is going to look so similar in the eyes of granting agencies,” Rustow told the ‘Prince.’ “But then we thought ‘you know, it doesn’t hurt to try.’” Rustow was in Cairo when she was informed of the award, beginning work on the conservation of a medieval synagogue.

Another project granted funding focuses on Karl Barth, a 19th-century German theologian. Bruce McCormack, former director of the Center for Barth Studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary, feels that the work he and his protegé, current director Kate Dugan, do on Barth is essential to the religious and political dialogue of that period and the present. 

“By almost everybody’s measure, Karl Barth is the most important Christian theologian, not just of the 20th century, but maybe one of the top two since the Middle Ages. One pope compared him to Thomas Aquinas in his importance,” McCormack told the ‘Prince’ in an interview. “This is a person of enormous consequence in Christian theology.” 

McCormack’s NEH grant will support the next stage of a 10-year-old project to translate Karl Barth’s Lectures and Shorter Works until his death in 1968 into English. This specific grant will support volumes seven and eight of these works, which cover his writings from 1934 to 1937. McCormack shared that there is a team of about 18 translators who have been working on this that the grant supports. It is McCormack and the team’s third NEH grant. 

“What their ongoing funding has meant to us is that we can keep going, that there is interest on the part of the NEH,” McCormack told the ‘Prince.’ “They recognize the historical importance of the figure we’re dealing with, Karl Barth, and they clearly see the need for us to continue putting out more and more volumes as we can.” 

Although McCormack appreciates continued support from the NEH, he noted that the humanities still appear to be under attack, which will not end until people move past the ideology that only the studies that yield direct monetary gain should be supported. 

“I think we’re still under attack, and it grieves me more than I can tell you,” McCormack said. “The humanities humanize, and that’s really, really, really important. They make us better human beings.”

For Krakowski, the awarding of these grants is an encouraging and a positive sign.

“This project, and the project that Professor Rustow was awarded for, are very much the kinds of projects in the humanities that a grant like this, the scholarly editions and translations, is uniquely positioned to support, and it is incredibly, incredibly encouraging,” Krakowski said. “I’m obviously personally incredibly excited, but it is also encouraging to see these kinds of projects supported.”

The NEH did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the awarding of grants now and in the future. 

Luke Grippo is a head News editor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from South Jersey, and typically covers the state of higher education, University affairs, and state politics. He can be reached at luke.grippo[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

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