Humanities Center nabs Mellon grant

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1 million matching grant to the Stanford Humanities Center's Mellon Graduate Research Workshop Program.

Two successive expendable grants from the foundation have sustained the workshops since their inception in 1995. "This large step toward permanence is a powerful statement of support from the Mellon Foundation for which we are profoundly grateful," said John Bender, the Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Meier Family Professor in Humanities, who was recently reappointed to a second three-year term as director of the Humanities Center.

The Mellon program, which began with just six workshops in 1995, currently funds 19. Over this period, with parallel support from the School of Humanities and Sciences, the program has directly or indirectly reached virtually every Stanford faculty member and graduate student in the humanities, many faculty in the social and natural sciences, and colleagues at other Bay Area universities. The workshops coordinate with departments on campus to organize visits by major scholars and develop conferences and symposia.

The aim of the workshop program is to foster research agendas in the humanities while providing new contexts for graduate training and dissertation research. A typical workshop brings together faculty members and advanced graduate students, meeting regularly to present work in progress and to explore topics and problems of common intellectual concern. The goal is to enrich research opportunities in a time of shifting disciplinary boundaries while encouraging graduate students to enter into ongoing scholarly dialogues.

For more information about the program and how to support it, contact Susan Sebbard, assistant director of the Humanities Center, at 723-3053 or sebbard@stanford.edu.