July 5, 2011

Mellon Foundation grants $3 mill for humanities doctoral students

A $3 million endowment grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will increase support for doctoral students in the humanities in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins. The grant will primarily give stipends to doctoral students during the summer months, when they are preparing for field examinations, conducting research and writing theses.

“We are so grateful for this additional funding from the Mellon Foundation, which will help us continue to attract the very brightest students to our graduate programs,” said Katherine S. Newman, the James B. Knapp Dean of the school. “This significant grant will allow us to begin providing sustained support for our graduate students in the summer months, when they make critical progress toward their degrees. We will be able to improve student stipend levels and enhance programming.”

Depending on endowment performance over the next few years, the new Mellon funding also may enable the humanities departments at Johns Hopkins to expand their advanced, individualized language trainings to include Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Aramaic and numerous African languages. Grant monies also could supply funding for individual travel and research, which will provide doctoral candidates more opportunities to vet and refine their studies with global peers.

“This generous funding will have a profound impact on our ability to support the changing and increasingly complex requirements of graduate education in the humanities,” Newman said. “I am especially grateful to Gabrielle Spiegel, the Krieger Eisenhower Professor of History, who was instrumental in helping us craft the proposal.”

The new funds will be available in 2012 and will supplement the existing Mellon Endowment for Graduate Students in the Humanities, established in 2007 to support graduate training and research.

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants currently support five core program areas: higher education and scholarship, scholarly communications and information technology, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. The foundation’s grant-making philosophy is to build, strengthen and sustain institutions and their core capacities.