The National Endowment for the Humanities announced today the awardees of its Next Generation PhD: Planning and Implementation Grants. The grants will support efforts at a range of institutions to rethink the relationship between the doctoral curriculum and the career paths of humanities PhDs.

Historians are playing a central role in many of the funded projects. One recipient of a $350,000 implementation grant is the University of Chicago, a partner in the AHA’s Career Diversity for Historians initiative that seeks to expand the career horizons of history graduate students. Kenneth Pomeranz, professor of history at Chicago, said that the biggest lesson learned from the AHA’s pilot program “is that rather than think in terms of preparing people for two distinct job markets—one academic and one nonacademic—we should really think of a big, diversified job market and skills that will help in either of those markets.” The NEH grant will enable Chicago to continue to pursue this aim.

The NEH grants and recipients show the growing impact of Career Diversity for Historians. Since calling for “No More Plan B,” the Association has reframed the discussion of PhD education and supported the work of graduate students, faculty members, and historians in all professions to demonstrate the full value of historical work at the doctoral level. In addition to pilot sites at the University of Chicago, the University of New Mexico (another NEH awardee), Columbia University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, the AHA’s program includes small grants to departments to experiment with creating cultural and curricular change in their doctoral programs. We are pleased to see that some of these institutions— Georgia State University; University of Texas at El Paso; University of California, Irvine; and University of North Carolina—have also received funding from the NEH for their projects. AHA members are directing NEH Next Generation PhDs projects at Washington University in St. Louis (Jean Allman); University of Texas at El Paso (Charles Ambler); Duke University (Edward Balleisen); University of New Mexico (Melissa Bokovoy); Wayne State University (Elizabeth Faue); Princeton University (Anthony Grafton); University of California, Santa Barbara (John Majewski); Loyola University, Chicago (Patricia Mooney-Melvin); and the University of Cincinnati (David Stradling).

Read a full list of winners and project descriptions from the NEH.

Interested in how can explore career diversity in your own career path? Stay tuned for information about valuable sessions for graduate students, job seekers, and faculty at the 2017 annual meeting in Denver.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.