The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will continue to support the Central New York Humanities Corridor -- an interdisciplinary partnership among Syracuse University (SU), Cornell and the University of Rochester -- with an award of $1 million over three years for Phase II of the project.

The renewed support will allow the corridor to enhance scholarship in the humanities and foster regional collaboration and new connections among faculty, students, programs and resources in shared areas of scholarly interest. The initiative, based at SU, began in 2006 with a $1 million, three-year Mellon grant, and is centered on the collective work of faculty groups from the three institutions.

Phase II focuses more closely on creating interdisciplinary clusters -- in digital humanities; literature, language and culture; and archives and media -- and promoting new areas of inquiry, such as the digital humanities, maximizing each school's access to new expertise and resources. Phase II also will increase the number of annual visiting research collaborators.

The initiative is anchored at all three universities by a humanities center or interdisciplinary program. Gregg Lambert of the SU Humanities Center is principal investigator. Co-investigators and project directors are Timothy Murray, Cornell professor of comparative literature and English, director of The Society for the Humanities and curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Studies; and Thomas DiPiero, of The Humanities Project at the University of Rochester.

The corridor "represents a tangible and very practical response to the so-called 'crisis of the humanities,'" Lambert says. "By combining research missions in areas of overlapping strength, [and] fostering new areas of humanistic inquiry that cannot be supported by one institution alone, the overall goal of the Humanities Corridor is to create opportunities for new kinds of collaboration, including other liberal arts colleges in the region."

Murray says: "The Mellon Foundation's exciting validation of the corridor couldn't come at a better time as we seek innovative ways to extend the reach of the humanities on our campuses and throughout Central New York. The Corridor has provided invaluable opportunities for Cornell faculty and graduate students to expand their intellectual horizons in tandem with their peers at Syracuse and Rochester. Our visiting fellows at the Society for the Humanities also embrace the added opportunity to share their work with colleagues in the region. Mellon's generous award provides welcome resources for intellectual programming and collegial exchange at a moment when humanities centers across the country are turning to the Central New York Humanities Corridor for its exemplary model of regional exchange."

Over the years, the initiative has fostered collaborative research and group conversations among more than 60 faculty working groups. Notable corridor initiatives and programs since 2006 include:

Information: http://www.syracusehumanities.org/mellon.