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Other article:
Mellon Foundation Grant Strengthens Humanities at Emory
February 24, 2010
Source: Community Partnership Update/March 2010
Emory University recently received a grant of $2.4 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the reassessment, reconfiguration and strengthening of the humanities across the University.
Emory is anticipating hiring a new generation in the humanities who will have both deep training in the humanities and broad training in other areas.
As an example, Earl Lewis, Emory's provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, cites the interdisciplinary collaborations surrounding February's opening of the Salman Rushdie archive, much of which was born digital material.
At the core of the program will be the recruitment of a cohort of junior and mid-career faculty across the humanities, says Claire Sterk, senior vice provost for academic affairs. These new faculty will form the core of a "Society of Fellows" who will work to help guide how humanities departments and faculty can export principles of humanistic inquiry across the university. They also will seek opportunities for transformation of the humanities themselves at Emory.
Graduate students also will be included as Student Fellows in the program, their involvement serving as a bridge to the next generation of faculty.
While science research at other universities has begun to move toward research in the humanities, "one of the things that's unique about Emory's approach is that we're proposing bringing the humanities into science research, including the health sciences," says Sterk.
The program will start small, bringing in a cohort of two to four people and building from there. Recruitment, says Sterk, will start immediately.
Lewis says he sees the program building on three broad areas: digital scholarship, mind/brain neuroscience and humanities in the age of the human genome. "It's becoming impossible to talk about what it means to be human and recognizing DNA analysis without inserting humanities scholars into the conversation with life scientists," he says.
Faculty already involved in the program expect its reach to be felt across the University, says Sterk, especially in Emory and Oxford colleges and at Candler School of Theology.
Sterk says refocusing the humanities could have multiple impacts on higher education and help define the future role of the liberal arts at a research university. "Emory will have wonderful opportunities to show how research scholarship in the humanities really contributes to the common good," she says.
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