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

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.

The Office Foundation Relations is available to consult on proposal narrative elements and answer other foundation-related questions. Please contact Kate Totino, Associate Director of Foundation Relations at University Park (kxf188@psu.edu) for additional support.