Materials and Services Support

The Center for the Humanities provides 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

Spring 2021: The Board will meet on the first Friday of each month in spring 2021. Please submit funding requests one week in advance of any given meeting, to ensure consideration. Spring deadlines fall on Jan. 29, Feb. 26, March 26, and Apr. 30.

In general, faculty should plan to request funding in advance of upcoming expenditures, and requests for retroactive funding should be avoided. However, 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. 
• 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 examples of appropriate formulations of acknowledgment.

Additional Information

In addition to addressing the criteria above, proposals should include the applicant's current curriculum vitae and a detailed budget, including explicit statement of the amount of funding requested from the Center in the opening paragraph. The Board will not consider requests for "whatever support you can offer," or the like.

Those considering applying for this support are strongly encouraged to consult with the Director of the Center. Preliminary inquiries may be emailed to leah.kalmanson@drake.edu.

Complete proposals should be sent electronically, as attachments in standard document format to leah.kalmanson@drake.edu.