Mellon Foundation Awards Four-Year Grant to Penn Humanities Forum
January 2006
The School of Arts and Sciences has learned that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation renewed its funding of the Penn Humanities Forum with a grant of $378,000 over the next four years.
The Penn Humanities Forum seeks to promote an ongoing conversation among scholars and students from diverse academic disciplines and the general public. Launched in 1999 with a Celebration of Philadelphia Writers, the forum has maintained its unique blend of festive public appeal and serious scholarship through an array of lectures, performances and exhibitions that explore a different theme each year. Past topics include belief, human nature, sleep and dreams, time, and style. This year’s theme is word and image.
“The Penn Humanities Forum embodies the very essence of a liberal arts education,” said Dean Rebecca Bushnell, “a vital intellectual conversation that brings teaching and learning to life across the arts and sciences, and Penn at large. The strong interdisciplinary thrust of the forum and its inclusion of the public into that conversation reinforce Penn’s distinct identity. We are grateful for the support of the Mellon Foundation in advancing the fundamental purposes of the Humanities Forum and the University.”
“The grant supports 20 fellowships that allow selected undergraduates to carry out independent research projects and present the results publicly in their spring conference,” said Wendy Steiner, founding director of the Penn Humanities Forum and the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English. “The grant makes possible the mentoring of these students by graduate students and supports the faculty advisors to both the graduate and undergraduate programs. It also supports an interdisciplinary conference organized and run by graduate students each year, a professional activity that normally does not come until one is an advanced faculty member. We are truly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for making all of this possible.”
The support of the Mellon Foundation has been essential to the forum’s mission of highlighting the value of humanistic culture across scholarly fields and in the everyday lives of people outside the University. In 2002, Mellon awarded the Penn Humanities Forum a three-year grant of nearly $294,000 to develop and sustain innovative activities for faculty, and graduate and undergraduate fellows engaged in interdisciplinary research and teaching.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation makes grants in higher education, museums and art conservation, performing arts, conservation and the environment, and public affairs. Long-term collaborative planning by the foundation and its grantee institutions, whose experience qualifies them to work effectively in these areas, precedes all awards and is an integral part of grant making.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of New York, is the result of the consolidation on June 30, 1969, of Old Dominion Foundation into the Avalon Foundation, with the name of the latter being changed to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Avalon Foundation had been founded in December 1940 by Ailsa Mellon Bruce, daughter of Andrew W. Mellon, as a common law charitable trust. In 1954, it was incorporated under the Membership Corporations Law of the State of New York. Old Dominion Foundation had been established in 1941 under the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia by Paul Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon.