Professor Deborah Cohn has received a research award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for her project, “Humanities Without Walls seed funding.” A brief description of the award is as follows:
“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded approximately $12,200,000 to the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to fund eleven years of an extensive consortium of sixteen partners in the Midwest and beyond. By leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses, the consortium, titled Humanities Without Walls (HWW), aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. The consortium was initially funded in 2014 with a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, was renewed in 2016 with an additional $4.2 million, and was renewed for a second time in 2020 with an additional $5 million.
HWW, led by HRI Director and Principal Investigator Antoinette Burton, makes possible two initiatives: (1) summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities who desire to explore diverse careers in which they can use their expertise and credentials, both inside and outside the academy, and (2) funding for cross-institutional teams of faculty and graduate students pursuing research that focuses on a grand intellectual challenge.”
More information can be found at: https://www.humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu/about/index.html