Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
$500,000 won
Narrative Approach
Verified Win

Mellon Foundation: the humanities and public scholarship framing

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds humanities scholarship and the arts. Frame your proposal as advancing humanistic inquiry and public engagement with the humanities, not as arts programming alone.

Dr. Henry Washington

Director of Public Humanities

California Humanities Collaborative

52 upvotes

The Strategy

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds higher education in the humanities, the arts, humanities scholarship, and civil society organizations engaged with humanistic inquiry. If your proposal is 'we will produce an arts festival,' that is arts programming, and Mellon may decline it. If it is 'we will explore how public art can illuminate community history and foster civic dialogue,' that is humanities-informed arts, and Mellon may fund it. The humanities framing: Mellon funds work that engages with humanistic questions — history, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, art history. Show how your arts project is grounded in humanistic inquiry. Name the scholars, the historical context, the intellectual questions. Higher education: Mellon is the largest funder of humanities in higher education. If you are a…

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mellon
humanities
public-scholarship
higher-education
arts

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