Trump admin pulls $120K in grants for research on LGBTQ cartoonists, ‘multiethnic’ studies, report says
President Donald Trump’s administration has pulled $120,000 in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants tied to LGBTQ-themed comics and "multiethnic" research, according to a new report.
The NEH canceled a $60,000 grant awarded to University of Florida English professor Margaret Alice Galvan for a book, "Comics in Movement," which "examines how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s," The College Fix reported.
The description for the grant states that, "While these cartoonists documented LGBTQ+ life and activism in a moment when the community was facing government neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis and disregard for their civil liberties, their comics have been largely forgotten."
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The NEH also reportedly canceled a $60,000 grant awarded to Maite Urcaregui, an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at San José State University, for a book titled, "Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature."
According to the grant description, the book was to examine "an emerging and significant nexus of literary and visual studies to examine the relationship between and among race, citizenship, and political belonging."
Urcaregui said she planned to "analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors alongside contemporaneous visual archives and critical legal histories to underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship’s inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions."
While the grants still appear on the NEH website, the agency told The College Fix, "Both grants were awarded at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration, and terminated in April 2025."
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The Washington Post reported on April 7, 2025, that the NEH canceled over 1,200 grants following staffing and funding reductions tied to federal cost-cutting efforts.
In an announcement posted on April 24, the NEH said it had taken "programmatic steps to ensure that all future awards will, among other things, be merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country."
In July, Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction pausing the cancellation of certain NEH grants, citing First Amendment concerns.
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NEH, Galvan and Urcaregui did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.