Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

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A. Description

The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (CHPS)—with the support of the Robert and Margaret Rothman Endowment for the Humanities in cooperation with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), and the College of the Arts (COTA)—offers publication subventions to UF faculty in the humanities for books published by scholarly presses. For CLAS faculty, the CLAS Dean’s Office and CHPS will each fund half of the subvention. COTA faculty are directed to apply for a COTA Scholarship Enhancement Fund (SEF) award or a COTA Research Incentive Award, overseen by the COTA SEF and Research Committees, respectively, after which their applications will be forwarded to CHPS for supplementary funding. Faculty in other colleges will be able to apply for half of the amounts listed below from CHPS. There are three funding levels for this publication subvention:

• Tier One: $1,500
  Projects where subvention funds are explicitly required for publication—that is, where the publisher’s contract requires an author subvention in order for the book to be published—are eligible for $1,500 in subvention support ($750 from CHPS).
• Tier Two: $1,000
  Cases in which the subvention is not a requirement but would facilitate the publication or enhance the book are eligible for $1,000 in subvention support ($500 from CHPS). This category might include making the work more affordable, hiring a professional indexer, acquiring images and copyright permissions, or preparing an online resource to accompany the published work. The applicant must provide a brief statement explaining how the additional material will significantly enhance the book.
• Tier Three: $500
  If a faculty author receives contracts for two books within a single three-year period and has applied for and received CHPS/CLAS or CHPS/COTA subvention support for the first volume, the author is eligible for $500 in subvention support ($250 from CHPS). The same criteria and documentation requirements apply to second requests.

B. Eligibility

Applicants must be UF faculty in the humanities or related fields publishing a book project that is humanistic in its focus. Faculty members of Smathers Libraries, courtesy faculty, adjunct faculty, or postdoctoral fellows are not eligible. Applicants must foresee that they will be a faculty member at UF at the time of the book publication. Only faculty authors with a signed contract from a scholarly press for an academic book that will undergo or has undergone a peer-review process are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to sole-authored, original-research publications. Co-authored books, edited volumes, and publication of scholarly editions of original primary material will be considered. Translations of previously published material are excluded. CHPS uses a definition of the humanities adapted from the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 as the basis for determining the eligibility of proposed projects. Faculty members who have access to their own or departmental research funds are required to use those funds prior to applying for a CHPS publication subvention. Applicants needing to apply multiple funding sources toward a single subvention must indicate this in the proposal.

C. Deliverables

CHPS requires that subvention recipients include a credit line recognizing the subvention in publication, and that the authors submit a copy of the published book to CHPS. Publishing houses and freelance indexers and editors need to become UF suppliers in order to be paid. Once a subvention has been awarded, CHPS staff will contact the faculty author to arrange for payment.

APPLICATION

Provide the following information in the submission portal (COTA faculty follow instructions in ‘Description’ section): https://forms.humanities.ufl.edu/subvention/

1. Applicant information:
   • Applicant Name, Department/School and College, Rank, and Email
   • Name and Email of Applicant’s Chair or Director
   • Book Title
   • Publisher
   • Projected Publication Date
   • Dollar Amount Requested by the Publisher for the Subvention
   • Dollar Amount Requested from CHPS
   • Abstract (max. 100 words, written for a general audience)
2. Project questions:
   1. Is the publication conditional upon receiving a subvention?
   2. For what purpose would the subvention funds be used (offsetting publication costs, permissions, photographs, supplementary materials, etc.)? How will the subvention facilitate the publication or enhance the book?
   3. Are other possible funding sources available to you (e.g., endowed professorship, research funds, start-up funds, departmental funds)?
   4. If you are applying to additional funding sources, please list the sources and amounts sought from them.
   5. Provide an explanation of the academic status of the publishing house.
3. Attach and upload:
   • SUMMARY OF THE BOOK. Please highlight the significance for your field of study and the humanities writ large (max. 1,000 words)
   • SIGNED BOOK CONTRACT (or the relevant pages): The signed book contract or excerpt must include a delivery date for the final manuscript.
   • LETTER OR EMAIL FROM THE PUBLISHER documenting one of the following:
     1. For a Tier One subvention, attach a letter or email from the publisher documenting that a subvention of a specific amount is a required condition of publication.
     2. For Tier Two subvention, attach a letter or email from the publisher documenting the specific use of the publication subvention.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

The CHPS advisory board will review all applications with the following criteria:

• Whether the subvention is required for publication
• The ability of the subvention to enhancing the publication’s quality, impact, or distribution
• Availability of alternative funds for the subvention
• Academic standard of the publishing house
• Significance of the publication for the applicant’s field of study and the humanities writ large

Applicants are generally notified within one month regarding the status of their proposals.

PROPOSAL ASSISTANCE

Applicants are advised to write in clear, intelligible prose for the Center’s advisory board, which is multi-disciplinary and composed of faculty members from across the humanities. We invite applicants to write to the CHPS Director Jaime Ahlberg (jlahlberg@ufl.edu) in advance with queries about the publication subvention. For examples of previously awarded subventions, visit our website: https://humanities.ufl.edu/award-recipients/publication-subvention/