We are extremely pleased to announce that that the Critical Edition of Whitehead is now being funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program (see the NEH’s press release and Gonzaga University’s press release). This NEH grant will provide $350,000 over a three-year period starting on January 1^st, 2024 and expiring on December 31^st, 2026. It will fully fund staff wages and allow the hiring of two graduate student editorial assistants for ten hours a week, thirty-one weeks per year.

The work plan for the grant period includes the following:

(1)  Double verification, critical editing, and publication of the The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1927–1929 (HL3).

(2)  Initial transcription, double verification, and critical editing of the books Science and the Modern World (SMW), Religion in the Making (RM), and Symbolism (S), to be published together as one of the six critically edited volumes of Whitehead’s monographs. The volume manuscript will be submitted to Edinburgh University Press by the end of the grant period and published shortly afterward.

(3)  Initial transcription of 1,227 pages of handwritten lecture notes slated for The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1935–1937 (HL6). Double verification and critical editing of this material will take place after the grant period.

(4)  Initial transcription of 1,387 letters for a volume of Whitehead’s correspondence. Double verification and critical editing of this material will take place after the grant period.

In addition, though not part of the grant’s work plan, both volumes of Whitehead’s Essays and Articles (EA1 and EA2) are expected to be completed and published within this period, which will bring the total number of volumes of the Edition published to six out of a planned seventeen by 2027. An overview of the full Edition can be found here.

In the wake of this happy announcement, we also want to recognize the generous donors who have gotten us to this point—we could not have made it here without them. Yet, even with this grant, we still have decades of work ahead of us, and there is no guarantee that future NEH support will be forthcoming. We will continue to need financial support to maintain and expand the Whitehead Research Library and the newly-launched Whitehead Encyclopedia. We are hopeful that our generous supporters will continue or even expand their contributions in recognition of the work we are doing together!

The future of the Critical Edition of Whitehead has never been brighter. With a renewed vigor, we will continue to provide crucial scholarly resources for the study of Whitehead and his philosophy.