Beyond the Lab: Trump’s Funding Cuts Hit Humanities Research at Harvard

A database with pigment analysis of more than 300 Asian paintings. The authoritative dictionary of the Latin language, curated since the 1890s and spanning 1,200 years of inscriptions. A library of translated Ukrainian literature, launched just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The projects span disciplines, continents, and time periods. But they all have one thing in common: their funding was slashed this spring as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to exert unprecedented influence over Harvard and higher education.

The assault on funding for scientific research, which involves high-budget projects that rely on federal grants, has drawn the lion’s share of attention from both Harvard and the media. But humanities scholars at Harvard have lost more than $360,000 in federal grants since Trump took office.

In April, the National Endowment for the Humanities terminated nearly all its federal grants to redistribute funds to projects aligned with “the president’s agenda.” The agency followed through with its promise over the summer, allocating $34.8 million in new grants to projects on topics including former U.S. presidents and the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary.

The redistribution of the NEH funds was unrelated to the Trump administration’s funding cuts which targeted Harvard, but the terminations have still left many researchers at the University in the lurch. At least eight Harvard scholars lost their NEH grants, worth nearly $2 million in total, and have not seen their funds returned — even after a federal judge ruled that the NEH grant terminations were unlawful in August.

The Harvard researchers are now scrambling to find new funds, to varying degrees of success.

Usha Rungoo, an assistant professor in the Romance Languages and Literatures department, relied on an NEH grant to fund a year of research for her first academic book on literary geographies of resistance from writers of the Indian Ocean and Caribbean. That grant was terminated, but within days, Harvard agreed to cover the $30,000 in grant funds that had yet to be paid out to Rungoo.

Other researchers have not been as lucky.

Oleh Kotsyuba, the director of print and digital publications at the Ukrainian Research Institute, said he was hoping to use NEH funds to hire an editor for the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, which is managed by the institute. The initiative has only two employees, including Kotsyuba, making an additional editor a critical hire for the team.

When the NEH grant was terminated in April, Kotsyuba was forced to begin searching for new funds. The Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, humanitarian organizations providing aid to Ukraine, and private donors all agreed to provide funding. But Kotsyuba said that support has still not been enough to hire the editor.

“Humanities need all the support they can get,” Kotsyuba said. “Fundamental science, art science, medicine, research is very important — should be continued. But it doesn’t mean that the support for humanities has to stop altogether.”

Other researchers have not been able to secure any funding at all, forcing them to pause progress on their projects indefinitely.

Laura Morreale, a research associate in Medieval Studies, was working on digitizing a 15th century poem by a traveling Florentine merchant. She and her team tried fundraising after their project’s NEH grant was cut, but they only raised $250. That sum was just a fraction of the money needed to hire the web developer they were hoping would help publish their work online.

“At this point, it’s been five years of work. And essentially, you are ending up with something that’s less than what you had anticipated,” Morreale said. “You do get to the point where you’re like, ‘I’d like to finish it, but I need to get paid for the work that I do.’”

Across Harvard, the Trump administration has threatened well over $2 billion in multiyear federal grant commitments, using agency budgets as a tool to extract concessions.

In a major win for the University, a federal judge ruled earlier this month that the funding freeze was unconstitutional and ordered the administration to restore the grants that were cut pursuant to its targeting of Harvard. Researchers began receiving notices last week that their grants had been reinstated, but it remains to be seen when the money will start to flow.

The Trump administration has so far seemed intent on continuing to cut off Harvard from federal dollars. The Trump administration has vowed to appeal the judge’s ruling to higher courts. And Department of Government Efficiency officials have used their control over federal payment systems to prevent some life sciences grants from being paid out, even after an earlier court decision required their reinstatement.

The NEH grant cuts have even impacted an overseas project affiliated with Harvard: the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, a mammoth dictionary that aims to contain all Latin texts from the language’s origins in Rome in the sixth century B.C.E. through approximately 600 C.E. The project has been ongoing since the 1890s when German Latinists launched the project, and Harvard later joined the effort by sending students on one-year scholarships to support the research.

That fellowship program relies on NEH funding but lost its grant in April. Now, Classics professor Kathleen M. Coleman, a member of the dictionary’s executive committee, is soliciting donations from the department’s affiliates and others to keep the program going.

They have secured some funding from a grant donated by two Harvard alumni. But the long-term future of the scholarship is far from certain.

“One of the great glories of civilization is the contribution of the humanities to the nourishment of the human spirit,” Coleman said. “To limit that by cutting off the humanities or the arts seems to me to reduce our citizens to a pale simulacrum of what it is to be human.”

—Staff writer Catherine Jeon can be reached at catherine.jeon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @cathj186.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.