Mellon Foundation Awards $1.16 Million for Literary Scholarship

The University of California at Santa Cruz has announced that it is one of five university presses to receive part of a $1.16 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a series of scholarly books on the literatures of the non-English world.

Awarded through the foundation's Modern Language Initiative, the grant will be shared equally by the University of California Press in Berkeley; Fordham University Press in New York City; the University of Pennsylvania Press in Philadelphia; the University of Virginia Press in Charlottesville; and the University of Washington Press in Seattle.

The funding will support the publication of twenty titles by each press over five years. While the individual presses will keep their own editorial profile and acquisitions procedures, the copyediting, production, and marketing for the series will be centralized, with the goal of offering authors a shared space for publishing innovative scholarship that influences the way literature and language arts are researched and taught.

"It's a global initiative — the presses are American, but the projects can come from any scholar in the world," said UC Santa Cruz literature professor Richard Terdiman, co-founder and director of the FlashPoints literary book series at the University of California Press. "This grant reaffirms the importance of literary scholarship and the study of the humanities."

“Literary Studies Book Series Co-Founded at UCSC to Benefit From $1.16 Million Mellon Foundation Grant.” University of California Santa Cruz Press Release 2/13/09.

Primary Subject: Education
Secondary Subject(s): Higher Education, Arts and Culture
Location(s): California, Santa Cruz

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