Slots: All slots taken.
Deadlines
Internal Deadline: Tuesday, November 7th, 2023, 5pm PT Closed.
LOI: Interested applicants must complete the 2024 Higher Learning Call for Concepts registration form and submit the form by the registration deadline of Thursday, November 30, 2023.
External Deadline: Thursday, February 15, 2024
Award Information
Award Type: Grant
Anticipated Award Amount: Envisioned projects should be achievable with contributions from Mellon of $250,000 – $500,000, with durations of up to three years.
Who May Serve as PI: The Principal Investigator (PI) should be a faculty member or dean in a program or department in the humanities or humanistic social sciences, or the institution’s provost, and should have the support of the institution’s senior academic leadership. Applications that do not include a CV for
the PI will be disqualified from consideration.
Link to Award: https://www.mellon.org/article/call-for-concepts-higher-learning-2024
Process for Limited Submissions
PIs must submit their application as a Limited Submission through the Research Initiatives and Infrastructure (RII) Application Portal: https://rii.usc.edu/oor-portal/. Use the template provided here: RII Limited Submission Applicant Template
Materials to submit include:
- (1) Two-Page Proposal Summary (1” margins; single-spaced; standard font type, e.g. Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Georgia typeface; font size: 11 pt). Page limit includes references and illustrations. Pages that exceed the 2-page limit will be excluded from review. You must use the template linked above.
- (2) CV – (5 pages maximum)
Note: The portal requires information about the PIs in addition to department and contact information, including the 10-digit USC ID#, Gender, and Ethnicity. Please have this material prepared before beginning this application.
Purpose
In the interest of maintaining a grantmaking portfolio that supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import, the Higher Learning program at the Mellon Foundation invites ideas for research and/or curricular projects focused on any of the following three areas:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Visit our Institutionally Limited Submission webpage for more updates and other announcements.