The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has donated a matching grant of $500,000 to UR that will establish an endowment for the University’s continued partnership with the Central New York (CNY) Humanities Corridor.
The University plans to raise $500,000 to match the Mellon Foundation grant by Jan. 1, 2018, to establish the CNY Humanities Corridor endowment at UR. Establishing this endowment will enable more long-term planning, ensure the sustainability of the existing model, and expand it to include more academic partners across Upstate New York.
The CNY Humanities Corridor, which was founded in 2006 with the support of the Mellon Foundation, is an interdisciplinary collaboration among research institutions in Upstate NY. Schools such as Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester – along with the schools of the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium – focused on enhancing scholarship in the humanities.
Each of these schools brings their own humanistic scholarly tradition to the collective work of the CNY Humanities Corridor. The CNY Humanities Corridor in turn works to bolster the relationships and productivity of the region’s humanities community.
This grant will facilitate collaboration between humanities faculty at UR, Cornell University, and Syracuse University
by providing support for conferences and seminars, research collaboration, graduate student workshops, and master classes.
According to Provost and Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences and Engineering Peter Lennie, the success of the CNY Humanities Corridor brings together faculty with shared interests “as well as in sponsoring high-impact events in the humanities disciplines which demonstrates the value of this model, and its viability.”
Lennie said the grant will go towards a wide range of departments including Art and Art History, English, History, Modern Languages and Cultures, Music, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, sections of the Department of Anthropology, and some areas of the Eastman School of Music.
In October 2013, the Mellon Foundation gave UR a $1 million grant to create “Humanities Labs” at UR to tackle the growing demand of research in the humanities for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. The labs also seek to tackle the large-scale problems in the digital humanities and allow these programs to grow at UR. With the addition of the “Humanities Labs,” there has been an increased interest across the wide range of humanistic disciplines, including the digital humanities.
The Mellon Foundation, according to their website, “endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies. To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.”
Teitelman is a member of the class of 2015.
