Grants that Bring Projects to Life
McFadden Grants support humanities research and projects on the cusp of completion
By any account, the arts and humanities are alive and well at Colby. And that’s no accident.
Key to the abundance of creative projects and scholarly work by dozens of faculty members in the humanities is support from Colby’s singular Center for the Arts and Humanities. This includes a novel funding source known as McFadden Grants.
Established in 2020, they are designed to be “finishing” grants meant to get projects over any final hurdles and across the finish line. They provide funding at crucial late-stage moments in a project’s timeline by paying for various costs, including indexing, editing, image reproduction permissions, videography, or art installation expenses, for example.
Because the grants come at the end of a project, results happen quickly, sometimes within a few months. Books are published, productions staged, and articles submitted. Finished products accumulate, all because of McFadden Grants.
“This is very much a grant that brings things to life,” said Dean Albritton, director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities and associate professor of Spanish. As director, Albritton administers the grants.
McFadden Grants, up to $3,000, also uplift professors and their pursuits.
“It felt powerful to be supported by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and by Colby,” said Bess Welden, lecturer of performance, theater, and dance. Receiving a McFadden Grant felt like the College saying, “We think your creative research is important and we want to invest in you doing it in the way that you feel is important,” said the playwright, whose grant supported her play Death Wings.
Funding the performing arts
The McFadden Grants honor Provost and Dean of Faculty and Professor of American Studies Margaret T. McFadden, a beloved and respected campus leader who is retiring at the end of the academic year. The grants are part of a $1-million gift that established the Margaret T. McFadden Fund for Humanistic Inquiry in 2020 from Trustee Emerita Anne Clarke Wolff ’87 and Benjamin “Ted” E. Wolff III ’86.
The McFadden Fund also supports a Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab, or PHIL, a three-year interdisciplinary research collaborative.
Albritton believes the McFadden Grants are unique among colleges and universities. They were established in part because this type of funding simply doesn’t exist in many places for the arts and the humanities, he said. To date, 24 grants have been awarded.
Co-run by the Humanities Division and the Center for the Arts and Humanities, grants are awarded to three or four faculty members each semester as decided by a committee. Competition is robust with twice as many applicants as available grants for each round.
The process is straightforward, and the application is not onerous in any way, said Welden. “I really appreciated, actually, how efficient the whole process was because the outside grant world is not like that at all.”
Welden’s McFadden Grant paid for an ASL interpreter for one performance during the world premiere of Death Wings in 2023. Making her work accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing community felt important and necessary. And because the grant paid for an interpreter, it freed up some of her primary budget to include a deaf consultant on her ASL team.
She also hired a videographer to create a five-minute mini-documentary on the making of the production. That type of documentary is expected of artists today and will help her apply for future funding from other sources.
Including the interpreter and videographer allowed Welden to hire professionals and pay them what they deserved, she said. Without the McFadden Grant, she would have to apply for other funding or finagle her budget. The grant, she said, was “essential to us being able to complete those parts of the project.”
Funding book projects
The same holds true for photographer and Professor of Art Gary Green. His McFadden Grant paid for subvention fees for his latest photography collection, Almost Home. Typical in book publishing, subvention fees cover a percentage of publishing costs—paper, ink, binding, etc.—and are often the author’s responsibility.
“I had done the work, the book was ready to go to press, but I didn’t have all the money to pay for [the fees],” said Green of his third book published by L’Artiere Editions, which is known for its quality printing and new photography.
Finding grant money to pay for something as niche as his photography books is difficult, said the photographer. Without the McFadden Grant, he suspects he would have worked something out with the publisher, like trading prints. Or the fees might have come out of his own pocket. Instead, the grant allowed him to keep working with the publisher of his choice, seamlessly and with dignity.
This April, Green will attend the Photography Show 2025, produced by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, in New York, where he will participate in a discussion about Almost Home. “Maybe it’ll get some attention,” said Green, who is retiring this year and thinking about generating income in retirement.
Green acknowledges the grant’s support in the book’s acknowledgements. As for the award’s name sake, he said, “As dean of faculty and provost, Margaret has been a good friend to me and always provides support when she can.”
Funding writers
Writer Debra Spark also likes the association of the grants with Provost McFadden, who is not involved in the selection process. Spark has found McFadden a supportive provost, and she thinks the Center for the Arts and Humanities as a whole validates faculty work in a variety of ways, including with the grants.
Spark, an award-winning fiction writer, is the only professor to use a McFadden Grant for transcription. In addition to her novels, she is currently working on a book of essays, and she also writes nonfiction for various publications. These projects require interviews, which must then be transcribed—at a cost. She uses an AI program for many of the 100 interviews she’s conducted in the last few years. For others, she needs a human transcriber.
“For the book I am working on now, I had to interview a number of people with accents, and I’m hard of hearing, so I don’t hear all of what people are saying. Of course, I don’t want to get anything wrong or misquote, so I had to use human transcription for those interviews, as opposed to AI, and that can get expensive,” she said.
By recording her interviews, she can make eye contact and listen more fully. Having funds to transcribe those interviews allows her to conduct interviews with care and compassion by focusing on the interviewee. Using the McFadden Grant for transcription also enables her to use other funds to attend artist residencies, where she can truly escape to write.
“I’m just really, really grateful,” said Spark, echoing a sentiment expressed by other grant recipients.
“McFadden Grants enable us to get our work done,” said Spark. “And anything that helps you get your work done is great.”
