As part of the largest Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gift to The New School to date, the university-wide, four-year, $5M Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence aims to increase demographic and intellectual diversity at the doctoral, post-doctoral, and professorship levels through intellectual community, mentorship, and professional development.
To this end, the Mellon Initiative supports five unique fellowships, composed of Post-Doctoral Fellows, Dissertation Fellows, Faculty Fellows, Community Fellows, and a Joint Fellow, which currently is held with the Tishman Environment and Design Center and was previously held in conjunction with the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and the Initiative for the Study of Power, Politics, and Organizing. As part of their work within the initiative, Mellon Fellows will develop unique research projects based in the humanities, social sciences, or public policy concerned with the ways structural inequality–intersecting structures of social, political, and economic power–shape social and economic relations, culture, and daily life.
The Mellon Initiative seeks to foster these intersectional projects designed by academics and activist practitioners with a transdisciplinary framework to build a community within and beyond the University, expand university knowledge, and diversify approaches to these topics while informing pragmatic imaginations toward a world with more just arrangements of power. At the core of Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence is the biweekly Transformative Seminar, a meeting of all Mellon Fellows that serves as an opportunity for mentoring, networking, and community-building among the cohort and the broader New School campus.