Two University of Michigan projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Clare Croft, 2017 Norman and Jane Katz Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and assistant professor of music, received $6,000 for her project, “A Different Kind of Lady: Jill Johnston’s Political Embodiments of Dance Criticism and Feminism.”

The project undertakes research on important American arts critic and activist Jill Johnston as a window into examining the role of embodiment in American histories of arts and activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jeff Heath, professor of linguistics and Near Eastern studies, received $220,707 for “Documentation of Mbre and Tiefo-D Languages of West Africa,” a three-year project to document two endangered languages of West Africa, Tiefo-D in southwest Burkina Faso and Mbre (or Pere) of northern Cote d’Ivoire.

“Clare Croft and Jeff Heath are the latest of a succession of U-M humanities faculty whose passions and careers have been advanced by the National Endowment of the Humanities over the last 50 years,” said Sidonie Smith, director of the Institute for the Humanities.

“These grants testify to the excellence of their projects and to the critical role that NEH plays in supporting the work of the humanities in the academy and in the world.”

The NEH recently announced funding for 208 humanities projects totaling $21.7 million. Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the country.