In January, the Mellon Foundation announced that it has awarded Wellesley $1.5 million for its proposal, “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives: Rethinking Inclusion and Exclusion through the Humanities.”
The grant will fund a 3 ½-year program that will transform the College’s humanities curriculum through new and revised courses that demonstrate how humanities-based tools can address essential questions and shared dilemmas. “The overall object of the grant is to really think about what humanities can contribute to our understanding of the world that we live in right now,” says Yoon Sun Lee, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor in American Literature, professor of English, chair of the English department, and one of the project’s five principal investigators. To create cohesion across the humanities’ many fields, the courses will focus on three themes: democracy, environmental justice, and identity.
The grant will also fund dozens of student research projects using humanities methodologies, housed in a new humanities hub in Clapp Library, currently under renovation. “In the sciences, there’s already a model for bringing students into the research process and training them [in] how to do research and including them in these big projects,” says Lee, but there have been few opportunities for students to do research in the humanities. Lee will encourage faculty to think about the skills that they use in their own research and how they can equip students with those skills so they can use them in their own independent projects. Lee hopes that over the course of the grant, some 200 students will engage in paid research or public humanities projects.
Finally, the grant will fund public humanities projects aimed at a larger audience. “Not only scholars, not only students, but the broader world and the larger community,” says Lee. She and her fellow principal investigators—Dan Chiasson, Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English; Martha McNamara, senior lecturer in art; Cord Whitaker, associate professor of English; and Eve Zimmerman, professor of Japanese—will begin laying the groundwork for the program in the spring semester, with an official launch this fall. “The goal is to involve as many faculty across the humanities as possible, and we’ve already gotten a really enthusiastic response,” Lee says.
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