Posted on September 5, 2011

Mellon Foundation Awards $1 Million to Humanities Partnership

The University of Rochester has announced a three-year, $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the Central New York Humanities Corridor — an interdisciplinary effort by Rochester, Syracuse, and Cornell universities to enhance scholarship in the humanities.

Established in 2006 with a three-year, $1 million grant from Mellon, the initiative will use the latest grant from the foundation to connect faculty, students, and programs with resources in shared areas of scholarly interest, with phase II of the project focused on creating three interdisciplinary clusters: digital humanities; literature, language, and culture; and archives and media. Collective work by faculty groups from the three institutions will continue the regional collaboration that began in Phase I as well as promote new areas of inquiry, thereby maximizing each school's access to new expertise and resources.

Since the project began, it has bolstered a number of initiatives and programs among the more than sixty faculty working groups involved in the effort. "The variety of Humanities Corridor events and projects speaks to the incredible potential of interdisciplinary work and the importance of collaboration," said Thomas DiPiero, co-investigator and project director of the corridor and dean of humanities and interdisciplinary studies at Rochester. "As new fields emerge, such as the digital humanities, it is critical that scholars come together — as they do in corridor projects — from across the disciplines to imagine possibilities and consider the best use of shared resources."