Henry Luce Foundation
OVERVIEW: The Henry Luce Foundation’s largest area of grantmaking is higher education, which it supports mainly through its Asia, American Art and Religion and Theology grantmaking programs. The foundation’s American Art program is an important source of funding to small- and medium-sized museums working in the fields of American and Native American visual arts. Recent public policy funding has focused on governance and democracy during the COVID-19 crisis. The foundation’s newest program, the Native American Leadership Program, supports individuals and organizations that are involved in the preservation and dissemination of traditional knowledge and culture.
IP TAKE: This is a surprisingly accessible and flexible funder. In other regards, it’s not an accessible funder vis-a-vis its higher education funding. Grantees range from elite universities and cultural institutions to new initiatives at small colleges, museums and other nonprofits. The foundation accepts letters of inquiries for each of its grantmaking programs via its online portal. Fellowships and scholarships are usually administered by third parties, to which the foundation has linked application guidelines and due dates.
A responsive though bureaucratic funder, the Henry Luce Foundation offers highly competitive grants to individual researchers, universities and institutions. It had several other programs for humanities research, as in Italian Studies, but Luce has since closed many, so keep an eye on how this funder is evolving. It’s somewhat approachable, so don’t be deterred if contact is hurried. Excellent work is what wins grants here, as well as the changing winds of what’s popular to research in its interest areas.
PROFILE: The New York City-based Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by Time magazine co-founder Henry R. Luce. It aims to “enrich public discourse by promoting innovative scholarship, cultivating new leaders and fostering international understanding.” Its grantmaking programs are American Art, Asia, Indigenous Knowledge, Public Policy and Religion and Theology. A seventh initiative, Religion and International Affairs, ended its grantmaking program in 2021. Luce also funds scholarships, fellowships and professorships through its Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM and the Luce Scholars Program.
Grants for Visual Arts
The Henry Luce Foundation makes grants for the visual arts via its American Art initiative, which supports “museums, universities, and arts organizations in their efforts to advance the understanding and experience of American and Native American visual arts through research, exhibitions, publications, and collection projects.” The initiative runs three subprograms:
Responsive grants support “collection-based projects that advance the understanding and presentation of art of the United States” with the primary goal of “the reinvigoration of collections for new and established audiences.” The foundation names collections of “paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, decorative arts, naïve and outsider art, traditional and studio crats, architecture, design, and all aspects of Native American arts” as areas of interest. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City received funding for the exhibition and associated catalogue “Southern Make”: The Enslaved Potters of Edgefield, South Carolina. Another recent grantee, the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, received a grant for its exhibit of the works of Sargent Claude Johnson, a 20th century African American artist who worked in painting sculpture and ceramics.
The foundation’s annual exhibition competition supports one or more new exhibitions “that exemplify the highest standards of scholarship and museum expertise.” Competition entries are reviewed by a panel of experts that includes art historians, curators and journalists, and selection is based on “aesthetic and historical merit,” as well as “intellectual rigor and originality of the exhibitions conceptual framework.” Recent competition winners include the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts, which received funding for Paul Revere: Artisan and Entrepreneur, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which used funding for a new exhibition, Joan Mitchell: Fierce Beauty.
A third program awards ten dissertation fellowships each year to scholars studying art history at U.S.-based universities and is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. Fellowships are awarded to “students at any stage of Ph.D. dissertation research or writing on a topic in the history of the visual arts of the United States” and fellows receive a stipend of $38,000 and a travel and research allowance of up to $4,000.
Grants for Higher Education and Humanities Research
The Henry Luce Foundation makes grants for higher education through its Asia and religion and theology programs.
Luce’s Asia program aims to “encourage the development of expertise, capacity and resources in East and Southeast Asia, and to foster scholarly and cultural exchange between the United States and Asia.” The foundation names teaching and research in higher education as an area of interest. Recent grants have supported New York University U.S.-Asia Law Institute, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles and Michigan State University’s James Madison College, which used funding to advance interdisciplinary study of environmental justice issues facing communities that live along the Mekong River.
The foundation also supports humanities research via its religion and theology program, which has recently focused on advancing “public knowledge on the topic of race, justice, and religion in America.” Brandeis University’s Chaplaincy Innovation Lab received funding for a project to support “frontline spiritual care providers” during the COVID-19 crisis. Another grant went to Princeton University, which launched an initiative on Black religious histories and culture at its Center for the Study of Religion.
The Henry Luce Foundation also runs several scholarship and fellowship programs:
The Luce Scholars Program was established in 1974 to “enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American Society.” The program does not support scholarship, per se, but is a competition among college seniors at 75 participating colleges and universities who demonstrate leadership and excellence in any field other than Asian studies and who “have had limited experience of Asia and who might not otherwise have an opportunity in the normal course of their careers to come to know Asia.” Between 15 and 18 students are chosen to participate in a yearlong program that includes intensive language instruction and placement for work and cultural experience in one of 17 Asian countries, as well as a monthly stipend for living expenses.
China Studies Fellowships support early-career scholars who are engaged in postdoctoral research, publication projects or “who are embarking on new research projects” in the field of China Studies. These one-year fellowships are awarded in amounts up to $50,000 to ten scholars each year and are administered by the American Council on Learned Societies, which runs an open application for the awards each year.
The foundation also supports doctoral dissertations in art history for scholars conducting research on American or Native American Art with fellowships of up to $42,0000. The foundation runs an open application process for this award through the American Council on Learned Societies.
Grants for Racial Justice and Indigenous Rights
The Luce Foundation’s newest funding initiative, the Indigenous Knowledge program, replaces a former fellowship program in Native American studies and makes grants to support “knowledge keepers who seek to preserve and perpetuate their nations’ cultures.” A portion of funding from this program also supports the development of policy that supports “the resilience and vitality” of Native American communities and cultural groups. Early grantmaking from this initiative has gone to the Alaska Native Languages Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Colorado Plateau Foundation, which used funding for its Telling Indigenous Stories of the Colorado Plateau Program. Other recent recipients are the Native American Rights Fund, the First Nations Development Institute and Seattle’s Burke Museum, which runs educational programs and outreach activities focused on Indigenous knowlege.
Grants for STEM Education and Women
The Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM was established by Henry Luce’s widow and began supporting women in STEM education in 1989. The program awards undergraduate scholarships to cover the “final two undergraduate years” of up to four students each year, and undergraduate research awards to up to 24 undergraduate women who are engaged in faculty research and who plan to apply to graduate programs in STEM. At the graduate level, the foundation awards two graduate fellowships each year for students in the first two years of a Ph.D. program in STEM disciplines. The Program also funds several Clare Booth Luce Professorships for women faculty who are in the first five years of a tenure-track appointment. The program runs open applications for all awards programs with application guidelines posted on the foundation’s website.
Grants for Civic Engagement and Democracy
The Henry Luce Foundation makes grants for civic engagement and democracy through its Public Policy initiative, which is one of the foundation’s smaller giving areas. Grantmaking prioritizes orientation programs and materials for newly elected members of Congress and the study and analysis of the presidency and the judiciary system. Since 2020, grantmaking has also supported research and policy development on COVID-19-related issues. New York University’s Governance Lab received funding for a large-scale study of responsible governance and data use in the COVID-19 crisis, and the American Geographical Society received funding for a study of COVID-19-related surveillance. Other recent grantees include the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Women of Color in Leadership program at Trinity College and the Center for Rural Strategy’s Rural Equity Project.
Other Grantmaking Opportunities
The Luce Foundation’s religion and theology program aims to “foster fresh thinking about religion across multiple social and cultural contexts” and “to expand and diversify critical intellectual engagement with religion in the United States and beyond.” One recent area of specific interest concerns public understanding of the intersection of race, justice and religion in the U.S. While many grants from this program support institutions of higher education, grants have also gone to other types of nonprofits in recent years, including the Society for Biblical Literature, which received funding for an international cooperation initiative, and New York City’s Auburn Theological Seminary, which received funding for an initiative to “engage and convene religious leaders from Black, Latinx and White communities.”
Important Grant Details:
The Henry Luce Foundation makes over $30 million a year in grants, scholarships and fellowships. Its larger grants approach $2 million, but its average grant size is about $150,000. Higher education and humanities research is Luce’s largest area of giving. This is a surprisingly flexible funder, supporting many elite universities and institutes, but giving to new initiatives at many smaller colleges, museums and nonprofits as well. The foundation maintains a searchable database of past grants on its website.
This funder accepts letters of inquiry from eligible schools and organizations on an ongoing basis via its application portal. The foundation posts grantmaking guidelines and a link to its eligibility quiz on its website. Many of the foundation’s scholarships and fellowships are administered by outside organizations, but these also generally run open application processes and are linked to the individual program pages. General inquiries may be submitted to the foundation via email or telephone at 212-489-7700.
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