Please see details below regarding the 2026 Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute (HAVI), supported by Schmidt Sciences.
If you or your team/collaborators are interested in this opportunity, we encourage you to reach out directly to Colleen Cross Quinn (ccross@nd.edu) and Tom Scrace (tscrace@nd.edu) in the Office of Foundation Relations for more information, including how to apply.
We also encourage you to attend one of the informational webinars hosted by Schmidt Sciences. Registration for the January 20th event can be found here, and for the February 24th event here.
Schmidt Sciences: 2026 Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute (HAVI)
- Deadline: March 13, 2026 (11:59 PM EDT)
- Informational Webinars: January 20, 2026, and February 24, 2026 (1:00 PM EST)
- Amount: Level I: $100,000 – $299,999; Level II: $300,000 – $800,000
- Duration: Level I: 1–2 years; Level II: 1–3 years
Current AI models struggle with multilingual contexts, multimodal datasets, and the nuances of historical and cultural diversity, hindering their application in humanities disciplines. HAVI aims to address these limitations by fostering interdisciplinary collaborations between AI and humanities researchers, focused on developing and applying new AI techniques to answer complex and compelling humanities research questions. Our approach expects humanities scholars to play integral roles in AI development, while AI researchers gain deeper understanding of data, models, and problem spaces from humanistic perspectives. This collaborative framework aims to produce breakthrough results that advance both AI capabilities and humanities scholarship.
Research Focus and Goals Projects should be aimed at addressing complex humanities research questions through:
- Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Fostering partnerships between AI and humanities researchers to develop and apply new AI techniques.
- Mutual Advancement: Producing breakthrough results that advance both AI capabilities and humanities scholarship.
- Addressing AI Limitations: Improving how models handle historical diversity, cultural nuances, and diverse datasets.
Out-of-Scope Topics
Although the topics below are important and may be the focus of future HAVI grantmaking efforts, they are out-of-scope for this request for proposals:
- The creation of AI-aided artistic works.
- Policy, policy-adjacent and advocacy projects.
- Projects focused primarily on the history and/or critique of AI.
- Projects focused primarily on pedagogy and curriculum development.
- Development of AI methods without a humanities focus; humanities-based projects that do not propose the use of AI.
- Pure digitization projects.
- Non-technical aspects of AI, including ethics, policy, and governance research.
Teams and Eligibility
- Co-PI Requirement: Ideal projects will have co-Principal Investigators with expertise from both the humanities and AI domains.
- Dual Focus: Proposals must address research questions from both the humanities and AI fields.
Please contact Colleen Cross Quinn (ccross@nd.edu) and Tom Scrace (tscrace@nd.edu) in the Office of Foundation Relations if you would like to apply.