Deadline: 30 November 2023
In the interest of maintaining a grantmaking portfolio that supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import, the Higher Learning program at the Mellon Foundation invites ideas for research and/or curricular projects.
Grantmaking Areas
- Cultures of US Democracy
- Extending well beyond a discrete set of governmental practices, democracy additionally encompasses the circumstantial conditions that enable those practices to flourish, including a generalized capacity for thoughtful deliberation; broad respect for, acceptance of, engagement with, and even fostering of difference; and a prevailing ethic of reciprocity. Humanities scholars are especially well equipped to consider how such conditions—which are specifically cultural functions rather than properly political matters—can best be achieved, nurtured, and sustained within the increasingly complex and fractured society that is the United States.
- They welcome submissions from scholars working in all areas of the humanities, particularly those seemingly far removed from questions of political philosophy and democratic theory.
- Environmental Justice Studies
- Rapidly accelerating environmental degradation is the paramount existential threat of the time, and its differential effects make it an urgent social justice concern. Recognizing that the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of this crisis demand deep and sustained attention from humanities thinkers, Mellon’s Higher Learning program seeks to support the most vital humanities-based environmental justice work currently underway at colleges and universities across the country.
- Understanding “environment” to encompass everything with which humans interrelate, they invite ideas from scholars engaged in elaborating and promoting just outcomes for populations rendered environmentally vulnerable through factors of race, class, gender, ability, geography, and their intersection.
- Social Justice and Disciplinary Knowledge
- Scholarly fields and disciplines are never merely “academic,” in that they aim to illuminate aspects of the world at large, well beyond the academy itself. In as much as that larger world has always been characterized by various forms of division and inequity, even the most seemingly hermetic fields of inquiry must inevitably confront considerations of social justice in their respective areas of focus, manifest not only in the objects, ideas, methods, and communities they engage but also in their sense of disciplinary mission and cultural norms. They seek ideas for projects that best exemplify how specific disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields of study are equipped to reckon with issues of social justice, given the particular investigative and analytical methods they deploy.
- While they welcome submissions from across the humanities, they are especially interested in applications grounded in long-standing fields such as art history, classics, history, languages and literatures, musicology, philosophy, and religious studies.
- Preference will be given to projects that reflect explicitly on the relevant discipline’s or interdiscipline’s particular capacity for social justice analysis as well as its limits in this regard, and that propose concrete pedagogical, research, and/or community-engaged efforts that have transformative potential for the institution and the wider field.
Funding Information and Duration
- Envisioned projects should be achievable with contributions from Mellon of $250,000– $500,000.
- Grants will start on the first day of the month following approval and may have durations of up to three years. (For example, grants approved in October 2024 will start on November 1, 2024 and should end by October 31, 2027).
Eligibility Criteria
- To participate in this call for concepts, an organization must:
- Be an accredited, non-profit, four-year, degree-granting institution in the United States that offers liberal arts education.
- Offer multiple degrees in humanities and/or humanistic social science disciplines.
- Enroll more than 1,000 full-time, degree-seeking undergraduates.
Ineligible
- The following institutions are not eligible to apply for funding, although they may be referenced as partners in applications:
- Institutions based outside the US and its territories
- For-profit institutions
- Fully online institutions
- Research institutes
- Special Focus Institutions, as defined by the Carnegie Classifications (This includes medical schools and centers and other health professions schools; engineering and other technology-related schools; business and management schools; arts, music, and design schools; law schools; and seminaries or seminary-like institutions.)
For more information, visit The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
