Mellon Foundation to Fund Two New CHCI Initiatives

At their most recent meeting, the Board of the Mellon Foundation approved our proposals for $1.3M for the CHCI Global Humanities Institutes and $500,000 for the CHCI Africa Initiative. This is excellent news for the next phase of CHCI.

The Global Humanities Institutes grow out of our previous collaborative projects: Religion, Secularism, and Belonging (RelSec); Humanities for the Environment (HfE); Medical Humanities (MedHum); and Integrative Graduate Humanities Education and Research Training (IGHERT). Thanks are due to all of the participants in those groups for their pioneering work. This new grant will allow CHCI to further refine our collaborative models, streamline administrative processes, and initiate as many as five new institutes over the next three years.

The Africa Initiative seeks to incubate cutting-edge research in the humanities in Africa and support the circulation of that research within Africa and throughout CHCI's global humanities network. The initiative focuses on two projects which will be funded for the next two years: "A Mapping of the Humanities in Africa," which will help us to understand where and how institutions and centers of humanities activity exist on the continent, and CHCI Africa Workshops, which will be a series of annual “summer" schools that will take place at various sites on the continent.

Over the coming months, we will work together to move these projects from proposal to implementation. More details will be posted on our site as they are available.