Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowships

Limited Submission Opportunity

Interest in applying due by July 1, 2022
Internal Applications due by July 15, 2022

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The Mellon Foundation has invited Hamilton to submit one proposal in consideration of the 2022 New Directions Fellowship. Fellowships provide up to $300,000 of support for faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Fellows pursue systematic training and academic competencies outside their own special fields in order to advance a cross-disciplinary research agenda.

Priority will be given to applications that manifest

1. a strong focus on issues of race, ethnicity, and migration; or
2. a focus on filling in the gaps left by more traditional narratives in the history of the Americas.

The Dean of Faculty’s Office is facilitating an internal application and review process to select a nominee for this opportunity.

• Eligible candidates will be faculty members who were awarded a doctorate in the humanities or humanistic social sciences within the last six to twelve years (2010-2016), and whose research interests call for formal training in a discipline other than the one in which they are expert.

• Such training may consist of coursework or other programs of organized study. It may take place either at fellows’ home institutions or elsewhere, as appropriate.

• Although it is anticipated that many fellows will seek to acquire deeper knowledge of other fields within the broadly defined sphere of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, proposals to study disciplines farther afield are eligible.

• The principal criteria for selection are:

1. the overall significance of the research,
2. the case for the importance of extra-disciplinary training for furthering the research,
3. the likely ability of the candidate to derive satisfactory results from the training program proposed, and
4. a well-developed plan for acquiring the necessary training within a reasonable period of time.

Internal Submission Instructions

Interested faculty should express interest by July 1 jritchie@hamilton.edu and apply for the internal competition by July 15.

Internal applications consist of:

1. a summary of the proposal (no more than 300 words);
2. a draft proposal (maximum length: 2000 words);
3. a proposed budget with a concise narrative;
4. a CV; and
5. a letter from the applicant’s department chair or program director that addresses two factors:

• how the proposed research will count toward the faculty member’s evaluation for promotion
• the candidate’s preparation for the proposed work and the extent to which it represents a ”new direction” for the candidate

If your proposal is selected, you will have until September 21 to revise your proposal and develop a detailed budget.

Sampling of Mellon-Funded Projects

• A three-year research project, “Slaves and Singers: Race, Work and Heritage in a Gulf Country.” The fellowship, in the amount of $300,000, will address social, cultural, and historical factors that shaped the experiences of Africans and their descendants in the Indian Ocean World, and their place in contemporary public depictions of the history of the Gulf states. The funding supports summer and sabbatical leave time, along with fellow’s training programs.
• To explore where property law and environmental law overlap or diverge, a path of inquiry which goes into legal terrain that strains the fellow’s disciplinary training in literary studies and feminist theory. Working at the interstices of environmental justice, feminist science studies, and Indigenous Pacific and transnational Asian American studies, the fellow will study the history of environmental law around oceanic bodies of water through research project titled “Settler Environmentalism: Transpacific Ecologies and the Gentrification of the Sea.” Part of the fellowship will be spent pursuing coursework in environmental law, Native Hawaiian law, and Indigenous law.
• The fellow will spend a year obtaining a master’s degree in women’s health and then embark on a research project exploring how the menopausal transition of aging was perceived among women and authorities in colonies in the 19th century British Empire before it was medicalized. The research, which will culminate with a book, will focus on womanhood, colonialism, and racism in South Africa, as well as Nigeria, Kenya, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
• The fellow, and art and architectural historian, will pursue additional studies and develop expertise in the theories and methods of historical archaeology, which will assist in developing a more complete understanding of how migration has changed the built environment in Barbados since slaves were emancipated there in 1834.

Full Guidelines

Purpose: Serious interdisciplinary research often requires established scholar-teachers to pursue formal substantive and methodological training in addition to the PhD. New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities, broadly understood to include the arts, history, languages, area studies, and zones of such fields as anthropology and geography that bridge the humanities and social sciences, who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of expertise. The program is intended to enable strong scholars in the humanities to work on problems that interest them most, at an appropriately advanced level of sophistication. In addition to facilitating the work of individual faculty members, these awards should benefit humanistic scholarship more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research.

Terms of the Awards: Candidates will be faculty members who were awarded doctorates within the last six to twelve years (2010-2016) and whose research interests call for formal training in a discipline other than the one in which they are expert. Such training may consist of coursework or other programs of organized study. It may take place either at fellows’ home institutions or elsewhere, as appropriate. Although it is anticipated that many fellows will seek to acquire deeper knowledge of other fields within the broadly defined sphere of the humanities evoked above, proposals to study disciplines farther afield will also be eligible.

The principal criteria for selection are: (1) the overall significance of the research, (2) the case for the importance of extra-disciplinary training for furthering the research, (3) the likely ability of the candidate to derive satisfactory results from the training program proposed; and (4) a well-developed plan for acquiring the necessary training within a reasonable period of time.

Priority will be given to applications that manifest

1. a strong focus on issues of race, ethnicity, and migration; or
2. a focus on filling in the gaps left by more traditional narratives in the history of the Americas.

Fellows will receive: (1) the equivalent of one academic year’s salary; (2) two summers of additional support, each at the equivalent two-ninths of the previous academic year salary, and (3) tuition or course fees or equivalent direct costs associated with the fellows’ training programs. To permit flexibility in meeting individual scholars’ needs, these funds may be expended over a period not to exceed three full academic years following the date of the award. The Foundation also expects the fellow’s home institution to use such budgetary relief as the award may occasion for academic purposes, preferably in the fellow’s department.

Application guidelines: The application consists of the following seven components:

1. A letter of endorsement from an officer (i.e., the president, provost, or dean).
2. A project summary of no more than 300 words (2,000 characters with spaces).
3. A proposal of no more than 2,000 words (13,000 characters with spaces), describing the overall significance of the research and how the proposed new direction will contribute to the development of the field.
4. A budget and budget description, using the templates provided. The budget should include items for salary and standard fringe benefits (including yearly increases), projected training costs, and project-related travel. The budget may include funds to cover expenses related to attending vital professional meetings. In addition, lodging expense related to research and training activities can be covered for stays of no longer than a semester. Requests for housing supplements may be included for longer periods when the projected cost of living in the city where study is to be pursued substantially exceeds the costs incurred when the fellow is working at the home institution.

5. Funds may not be used for overhead or indirect costs nor to stage conferences, symposia, seminars, or events related to the project. The Foundation assumes the needs for equipment or research assistants will be met by the fellow’s home institution. In an effort to recognize and address travel and access constraints related to the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic:

   Supplemental funds up to $15,000 will be available for scholars who require access to collections that have not yet been digitized and cataloged, or who require the paid support of a librarian or archivist to assist with research where collections are closed to outside visitors because of the pandemic. For example, payments from this supplement may be budgeted for library or special collections partners who would work closely with the New Directions fellow to identify and define archival or library collections that can be digitized and made available for study by the fellow and—when feasible—to members of the general public.

   Final budgets commonly range from $175,000 to $250,000; the maximum is $300,000. The term of the grant should cover a minimum of two years. Budget periods should align with reporting dates that work for the institution, but the first budget period must begin with April 1, 2023. The COVID-19 $15,000 research supplement is separate and additional to this budget and should be entered in the budget category Consultants and Professional Services.

   Since the Foundation’s annual budget provides a fixed amount for this program, the ability to accommodate changes in the budgets submitted is quite limited. In recent years they have denied requests for adjustment received after the selection of awardees and have mandated reductions in proposed budgets when certain items appeared not to be in line with the Foundation’s norms. Candidates should make every effort to base their estimated expenses on careful projections of all items in the grant budget.

   Candidates are advised to seek assistance from experienced department and sponsored-research staff in preparing the budget for submission.

6. A letter of recommendation from the candidate’s department chair or other senior colleague which should address the candidate’s preparation and the relationship of the “new direction” to the nominee’s research and pedagogy. An additional letter of recommendation from a colleague in the new field is strongly encouraged.

7. A concise curriculum vitae, no more than five pages in length.

   The project summary, proposal, budget, and budget description should be entered in the appropriate fields in the system. Please note that footnotes and endnotes do not always copy and paste properly into the Fluxx fields. All other components should be attached in the portal as PDFs. Note that there is an additional compliance section in the online application. While we do expect this to be completed, it is required for internal purposes and will not be viewed by the selection panel. The online application should be handled by someone in your sponsored programs office.

   Selection Process and the Making of Grants: Following an internal competition overseen by a committee of senior faculty members in the relevant disciplines, each institution will forward the proposal it has selected to the Foundation. The Mellon Foundation convenes a panel of distinguished scholars which chooses 10-15 finalists to present to the Foundation’s Trustees. Institutions and individual recipients will be notified and, if necessary, will work with the Foundation staff to develop their final requests. Once the Trustees have given their final approval, grants will be awarded to, and administered by the fellows’ home institutions, with projects to begin by April 1, 2023.

Questions about this opportunity or the process may be directed to Penny Yee.