Based on the success of a $1.4 million program launched in 2001, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Cornell University an additional $1,785,000 over five years to continue postdoctoral fellowships and seminars in the humanities and social sciences.

The grant will support 12 two-year postdoctoral fellows who will conduct research, participate in a weekly seminar series and carry light teaching loads. Fellows also will receive formal mentoring in scholarly publishing and job placement.

In a letter to the Mellon Foundation expressing Cornell's gratitude for the renewal, Cornell President Hunter R. Rawlings wrote, "As a regular participant in several of these seminars, I can testify to their overall intellectual quality and the interdisciplinary stimulation they provided our faculty and the fellows."

Said Provost Biddy Martin, who is providing an additional $225,000 to the program, "The Mellon Humanities Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows Program has provided a remarkable support network."

The seminar series is a vital component of the program, she added. "These seminars engage humanists at Cornell in discussion of the broader issues and challenges facing the humanities today. Humanists require a sharper sense of scholarly self-definition and a clearer vision of how their endeavors might best engage with the needs and promise of American society. The new round of Mellon seminars will allow concrete, rigorous discussion of these vital issues."

The seminar topic for fall 2006 will be "Performance and Interpretation," said Harry Shaw, senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of English. The topic will bring together creative artists with humanists who are experts in interpreting text. The following year's topic will be "The Public Intellectual."

"The seminars allow established Cornell colleagues from a wide variety of fields in the humanities and beyond to gather once a week for sustained intellectual discussion," Shaw said, adding that successful cross-disciplinary collaborations have resulted from the seminars. "The conversation is made even richer by the presence of the postdoctoral fellows, with their fresh perspectives."

Shaw is enthusiastic about the opportunities provided to young scholars by the Mellon postdoctoral program.

"The Mellon fellowships are extremely advantageous for young scholars who have not yet found regular faculty positions in today's tight job market," he said. "There are many fine graduates out there, and we get the cream of the crop."

In announcing the first Mellon grant in 2001, Walter Cohen, then vice provost and dean of the Graduate School, noted that the award was "part of a larger strategy for intellectual renewal in the humanities and interpretive social sciences."

Six Mellon humanities fellows have entered tenure-track jobs, and four are in non-tenure track jobs since completing their fellowships at Cornell. Cary Howie, who began his two-year fellowship in 2003 and accepted a position as assistant professor in Romance studies at Cornell on its completion, said the two most important benefits he received from the fellowship were "time" and an "intellectual community."

The time was necessary "to pull together my book manuscript; but also time to sit in cafés and figure out where my thoughts were headed: exactly the kinds of things that become more difficult in a tenure-track position," he said.

"The second most important thing was community," he added. "In the weekly seminars during the first year of my fellowship, I met several people whose importance in my intellectual and social lives has only become greater over time. Universities, like medieval monasteries, are caught between the communal and the solitary. I'm definitely more of a fan of academia in its communal mode."

Linda Grace-Kobas is senior director of Cornell's Office of Humanities Communications.