Research Innovation Collaboratives Grant

Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good
Founded by the College of Arts & Letters in 1984 as the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and renamed in 2025, the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good helps advance research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. To accomplish this goal, the institute provides faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the College with three main types of support.
Purpose
The Franco Institute invites proposals for Research Innovation Collaboratives to begin work during the 2026-2027 academic year.
These collaboratives encourage research and creative practice outside of departmental and institutional confines so that participants can radically reimagine the way their work can inform, influence, and inspire innovative scholarship. Each collaborative will consist of a group of scholars pursuing a core question (or small set of closely related questions). Collaboratives will foster research, art, teaching, and outreach, deepening connections across disciplines, and bringing the insights of the liberal arts to public life.
Research Innovation Collaboratives will take four forms:

• Humanities Collaboratives, devoted to “big questions” in the humanities approached from transdisciplinary perspectives
• Arts Collaboratives, co-sponsored by the ND Arts Initiative and devoted to collaborative research and creative practice in the arts

Global Catholic Research Collaboratives, co-sponsored by the ND Global Catholic Research Initiative and devoted to interdisciplinary, collaborative research on global Catholicism
Sustainability Collaboratives, co-sponsored by the ND Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative and devoted to interdisciplinary, collaborative research at the nexus of sustainability and the humanities.
Applicants will have the opportunity to select all of the above categories for which they would like to be considered.
All projects must follow all relevant college and university policies and procedures.

Eligibility

Each collaborative must have two Principal Investigators (PIs).
At least one PI must be a regular, tenure-track or tenured faculty member with a primary appointment in the College of Arts and Letters.The two PIs may not have primary appointments in the same department or program.
Each collaborative must also name at least three additional collaborators.
Collaborators may be advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, staff or regular faculty members with any appointment at the University of Notre Dame. They may come from any college, school, or institute within the university.Representatives from local community organizations may also be named as collaborators.
Individuals may not be named as PIs or collaborators on multiple collaboratives. A researcher becomes eligible to participate in a new collaborative only after the award period ends for any current collaborative with which they are formally associated.
The Research Innovation Collaborative program aims to fund new projects rather than ongoing programs. If your proposed Collaborative builds on an existing collaboration, explain how this funding program will help your team pursue new questions and outcomes.
Allowable costs include travel expenses, materials, catering, honoraria for guests, payments to external consultants, and production costs for publications, exhibits, novel forms of research dissemination, etc.

Ineligibility

Non-allowable costs include software already made accessible to the Notre Dame community and salary or additional course release for PIs.