Materials and Services Support

The Center for the Humanities provides up to $1,500 support to offset the cost of materials and services directly related to faculty members’ research or creative activity in the humanities.

Such materials and services include, but are not limited to purchase or rental of photographs or photographic slides; the purchase or rental of microfilm, the rental of a microfilm reader; access to relevant proprietary electronic databases, web archives, or internet directories for a specified period of time; reproductions of rare documents, artifacts or monographs owned by museums or libraries; manuscript-indexing services; research assistance; and reproduction permissions. 

Deadlines

The Board will meet on the first Friday of each month in the Fall and Spring semesters. Please submit funding requests one week in advance of any given meeting, to ensure consideration. In general, requests for retroactive funding will not be considered, but faculty may inquire with the Director if extenuating circumstances arise.  

Faculty who apply for grants to cover expenses already made assume the risk that the expenses will not be approved or reimbursed. In the case of retroactive requests for funding, these must be submitted by the next Board meeting immediately following the purchase. Requests for funding submitted at any later meeting after the purchase date will not be considered. 

Criteria

The following criteria will guide the Board in its deliberations:

• The project for which support is being requested should engage significantly with humanistic topics, problems, or methods.
• Material for which the support is being requested should not be already available and reasonably accessible at Drake.
• Material and services for which support is requested should be necessary to the timely and successful completion of the project.
• Material and services for which support is requested should not be primarily the responsibility of another unit to provide: for example, digital equipment purchases, library book acquisitions, journal subscriptions, and the like.

A Note on Books

The Center typically prefers not to fund the purchasing of books for research, asking the faculty members make good use of Cowles Library and other resources. In cases where books need to be purchased because they will, in the course of the work, be destroyed, or will be handled in a way that makes a library loan impractical, there may be exceptions.

Additional Information

In addition to addressing the criteria above, proposals should include the applicant's current curriculum vitae and a detailed budget, showing the specific funding amount requested and how it will be spent.

Managing Expeditures

The Center for the Humanities requires funding recipients and Center-supported program/event organizers to observe Drake University accounting guidelines. The University's tax-free status depends upon uniform observance of these guidelines. Expenses incurred in contravention of these guidelines will not be reimbursed. For more information, please read our grant management page.

Reporting

Recipients of funding from the Center for the Humanities are asked to provide reports on the impact and effect of the activities funded.

Acknowledging the Center

The Center's support must be acknowledged in the published work and, when possible, in announcements, presentations, and publicity materials connected to it. Please see the acknowledgments page for example formulations of acknowledgment.

Apply

To apply, please email your application and CV as attachments to humanities.center@drake.edu. The first two items in all applications should be (1) the amount requested and (2) the budget breakdown for the amount requested. We will also eagerly read about your project's details, timeline, and its importance to the Humanities at Drake and beyond, but we can only approve requests that include a total amount requested and a budget breakdown.