Cornell University has received a $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for postdoctoral fellowships and seminars in the humanities and related social sciences. The grant, for use over approximately five years, will help fuel ongoing academic initiatives in the humanities at Cornell, administrators say, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborations designed to open new horizons of research and to meet the needs of today's undergraduates.

"The Mellon postdocs will be part of a larger strategy for intellectual renewal in the humanities and interpretive social sciences," says Walter Cohen, vice provost and dean of the Graduate School, who co-wrote the Mellon proposal with input from other senior Cornell administrators. "We anticipate that many of the appointments will be in the area of American studies, very broadly conceived, especially in the core liberal arts programs of English, history and government."

The grant is the result of months of discussion among Cornell senior administrators involved with the humanities, including Cohen; President Hunter Rawlings; Provost Biddy Martin; Philip Lewis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and Jonathan Culler, senior associate dean of Arts and Sciences.

Plans for the proposal were modeled on a current seminar series at Cornell in social sciences, overseen by Peter Katzenstein, professor of government. The newly proposed seminar series would meet weekly throughout the academic year, says Cohen, and would include, ideally, two professorial faculty members with strong ongoing research careers for every postdoctoral fellow. These faculty members would include a social scientist and a natural scientist, Cohen says, and one professor would coordinate the seminar. The long-range goal is to have six postdoctoral fellows working with 12 faculty; however, that may not occur in the first year, he said.

Administrators hope to begin the process of soliciting faculty and advertising for postdoctoral positions before the end of January. Key goals for the Mellon proposal at Cornell include a transformation of American studies that gives ethnic American studies a critical place in the field; a focus on ethics and civic responsibility in the humanities; and further advances in the emerging area of visual studies.

"Beyond bringing together scholars from various disciplines, we intend to encourage work across at least three areas of contention," Cohen says. These areas of contention include: race and gender studies; the argument over what constitutes culture on the national level; and qualitative and interpretative approaches versus quantitative, computational methods of study.

"Our aim is not simply to encourage mutual tolerance, but to turn these differences of emphasis or outright disagreements into productive instigators of intellectual originality," Cohen says. "The best possible outcome of the seminar series would be developments in humanistic teaching, research and interaction with the public that we cannot yet imagine."