The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $2,050,000 to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to support the development of emerging areas in the humanities.
The funds will be used to support fellowships for Illinois faculty and graduate students, and undergraduate interns. The grant also provides support to bring post-doctoral fellows to the university, creating robust research groups in three areas: Bio-Humanities, Environmental Humanities, and Legal Humanities. These reflect areas of strength at Illinois, and they coincide with frameworks included in the 2013–16 Strategic Plan for the campus (Health and Wellness, Energy and Environment, and Social and Cultural Understanding). These complex areas of inquiry require applications of historical, literary, and visual thinking to advance knowledge across cultures and time. The grant will permit both artists and humanists to engage in research that more firmly links them to studies of the biological/medical world, in-depth intellectual involvement with ecological and environmental issues, and the intersection of the humanities with the law. “This grant is tremendously exciting for our campus and it will be a game changer for our faculty and students,” said Barbara J. Wilson, Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “Our broad-based excellence in the humanities made this award possible, and I am grateful to IPRH and to Dianne Harris for such creative work on the proposal.”
The new initiative will launch in the fall of 2016. The first cohort of fellows and interns will be appointed through competitive processes in the lead up to the 2016–17 academic year. Working together, these inter-generational and multi-disciplinary groups of scholars and students will form new intellectual partnerships that bridge traditionally understood areas of expertise. The grant provides opportunities for the research groups to engage with the exceptional resources of our campus to advance research and pedagogical practices in the three defined areas, and to contribute through their collaborative endeavors to the formation and broader understanding of these trans-disciplinary fields in the humanities and arts. These groups will also serve as models for cross-generational collaborations, and will create new curricular opportunities for undergraduates on the Illinois campus to engage in these areas of the humanities inquiry through the creation of undergraduate certificate programs.
IPRH Director Dianne Harris noted “This funding creates an outstanding opportunity for our faculty and students at Illinois to advance research and pedagogy in these critically important areas of inquiry. Our faculty and students are poised to make exceptional intellectual contributions that can shape new ways of understanding these fields nationwide. I remain very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for making it possible for us to engage in this important work.”
