Greetings,

The Mellon Foundation has announced a call for concepts to institutions of higher learning considering research or curricular projects in three distinct humanities-grounded and social justice-oriented categories: Cultures of US Democracy; Environmental Justice Studies; and Social Justice and Disciplinary Knowledge. Institutions are limited to submitting no more than three concepts to this program. Information on the award and internal selection process can be found in the synopsis and links below.

Mellon Foundation Call for Concepts: Exploring Democracy, Environmental Justice, and Social Justice

Harvard Internal Expression of Interest Deadline: November 30, 2023

Mellon Registration Deadline: November 30, 2023 by 3 PM EST

OSP Deadline (if selected): February 8, 2023

Sponsor Deadline (if selected): February 15, 2024 by 3 PM EST

Award Amount: $250,000-$500,000 for up to three years. No more than 10% of the grant funds may be used for indirect costs. This falls short of the 15% overhead required by FAS policy. Please discuss this with your grants administrator before preparing an application.  

Through its Higher Learning grantmaking area, Mellon invites humanities-grounded ideas for research and curricular projects focused on any of the following three topics:

1. Cultures of US Democracy: Projects that consider the circumstantial conditions that enable US democratic practices to flourish, including how those can best be achieved, nurtured, and sustained within an increasingly complex and fractured society. Submissions are welcome from scholars working in all areas of the humanities, particularly those seemingly far removed from questions of political philosophy and democratic theory.
2. Environmental Justice Studies: Projects that focus on specific systems (such as food, water, or health), ones that engage interrelated systems in a given community/locale, and ones that come at this topic through discrete analytical or disciplinary lenses. The strongest applications will center the co-creation of advanced humanities knowledge by academic constituencies and partner cohorts from affected communities.
3. Social Justice and Disciplinary Knowledge: Projects that best exemplify how specific disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields of study are equipped to reckon with issues of social justice, given the particular investigative and analytical methods they deploy. Mellon is especially interested in applications grounded in long-standing fields such as art history, classics, history, languages and literatures, musicology, philosophy, and religious studies.

We encourage interested applicants to review the Call for Concepts guidelines in full. 

This is a limited submission opportunity, and Harvard University is limited to submitting three proposals to this program. Eligible faculty members in the humanities or humanistic social sciences who would like to be considered for a Harvard nomination must submit an expression of interest (EOI) to research_development@fas.harvard.edu by November 30, 2023.

The EOI should be compiled into a single PDF file and include the following:

• Project summary (up to 2 pages) describing the potential project, including the rationale and specific activities it might involve. The summary should clearly state the topic area the project addresses, the necessity of the planned work, its goals, potential impact, the fitness of the institution and/or network to the proposed work, and an estimated budget with a list of the types of expenses the grant would fund. 
• Abbreviated CV for PI and any Co-PIs (up to 2 pages each)
• Interested applicants must also complete the 2024 Higher Learning Call for Concepts registration form by the registration deadline of 3 PM EST on Thursday, November 30, 2023. 

Questions about this opportunity may be directed to research_development@fas.harvard.edu.