About the Mellon Fellowships

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies supported exceptionally promising students pursuing doctoral programs in the humanities for nearly 25 years—from 1983 through spring 2006.  Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the fellowships were, for more than two decades, the only consistently available national fellowship for humanities doctoral study, providing a year of full graduate tuition and (in recent years) a $17,500 stipend to approximately 85 first-year doctoral students annually.

Mellon Fellows have received the Ph.D. from universities across the United States and Canada, including Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities, as well as the universities of Chicago, Massachusetts at Amherst, Michigan at Ann Arbor, and California at Berkeley.  Today, over 2,000 Mellon Fellows teach at the nation’s top colleges and universities, leading their fields through excellent teaching and scholarship in fundamental fields of learning. 
 
The Mellon Foundation suspended the Humanistic Studies Fellowship program at the conclusion of the 2005-06 academic year in order to explore new directions in funding for higher education.  In announcing the suspension of the program, Mellon Foundation president William Bowen and vice president Harriet Zuckerman stated: 

The Mellon Foundation’s decision reflects the significant changes in the conditions of doctoral education in the humanities over the last decade.  The leading departments in the humanities (where Mellon Fellows for the most part decide to go) and many others as well have reduced the numbers of first-year students they admit so that they can fund those students who are admitted more generously.  Many now provide new students with some form of multi-year funding ‘packages.’  By all reports, the overall quality of students applying to the leading graduate programs in the humanities is very high indeed; with reductions in the number of incoming students, programs have become ever more selective.  These developments and others have led the Foundation to conclude that the rationale for these one-year fellowships needs to be reexamined in light of such changed conditions.

Nancy Malkiel, chair of the Woodrow Wilson Board of Trustees, said about the program:

The more than 2,000 Mellon Fellows bring enormous benefits not only to higher education, but to the vitality and strength of intellectual and civic leadership in the nation as a whole.  The Woodrow Wilson Foundation has been proud to partner with Mellon in this important endeavor, and we look forward to a continued productive partnership as Mellon sets its new course under Don Randel, an honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow (1962), who will assume the Mellon presidency in July 2006.

The complete announcement from the Mellon Foundation is posted here.