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NEH still lists grants on its website, however.
The National Endowment for the Humanities says it cancelled a University of Florida professor’s grant to research LGBT cartoonists as well as another scholar’s work on “multethnic graphic literature.”
The NEH website lists a $60,000 grant, beginning on January 1 of this year, to English Professor Margaret Alice Galvan. The grant would aid Galvan’s research on “how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s.”
“Based on archival research, each chapter focuses on different grassroots publishing formats and shows how cartoonists wielded these neglected forms to develop their comics and build community,” the grant summary stated.
Galvin (pictured) aims to “[excavate] stories of vibrant queer communities to inspire a new generation at a time when LGBTQ+ people face renewed threats.”
Yet, the NEH says it canceled the grant and another one titled “Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature.”
“Both grants were awarded at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration, and terminated in April 2025,” an agency spokesman told The College Fix, linking the agency’s April 2025 update on its funding priorities under the Trump administration.
The spokesman did not respond to a follow-up email in the past several weeks asking why the grants have not been removed from the agency’s page. The grants were both still listed as of March 9.
According to Galvan’s university bio, her research “explores how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s.” She has also written a book titled “In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s.”
The second grant funded research by San Jose State University Professor Maite Urcaregui.
Her research “uses a queer formalist approach to investigate how multiethnic American authors strategically employ visual elements in their literature to navigate and critique the visual politics of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly as they demarcate who is seen as ‘citizen.’”
Urcaregui declined to comment for this story, while Galvan did not respond to emails on Thursday, January 29, and on Wednesday, February 25.
These are not the only identity-focused grants cancelled by the Trump Administration.
According to The Washington Post, the humanities agency canceled over 1,200 grants in April that leadership judged to “promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”
Among these is a grant to study “carceral disruptions,” as The Fix previously reported.
“The NEH grant to Catherine Besteman at Colby College for ‘The Praxis of Care: Carceral Disruptions and Community Resistance’ was terminated by NEH in April 2025,” Acting Director of Communications Paula Wasley told The Fix last September.
The research team planned to use “narrative analysis, oral histories, story-telling, feminist ethics, philosophical theories of the self, restorative practice, and deep personal experience,” according to the grant description.
Besteman’s research background includes “carcerality and abolition,” “security, insecurity, violence, militarism,” and “border crossing,” according to her faculty bio.
An online database lists 1,435 canceled grants, totaling $427,666,781. Both projects above appear in the database.
A federal judge paused some of the cancellations in July.
Editor’s note: The article has been updated to list Urcaregui’s correct title of professor, not doctoral student.
