Funding boost for Humanities Research Centre

The ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC) has been chosen to share in a $1.35 million grant which will help to train up-and-coming researchers and foster a collaborative culture within the humanities. 

The funding is from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and distributed to universities through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). Securing support from the Mellon Foundation is rare outside of Ivy League universities.

The grant will fund the second phase of the CHCI-Mellon project Integrating the Humanities across National Boundaries, an initiative designed to foster new forms of collaborative research and partnerships among the Consortium’s member organisations.

Along with humanities centres at three other universities, the HRC will be involved in a project which will provide extensive training and mentoring in the humanities to graduate research students. Called the Integrative Graduate Humanities Research Education and Training (IGHERT), the project brings together faculty, doctoral students, and post-doctoral scholars in a series of structured collaborations to undertake jointly mentored, international research.

“The program is about training academics from the outset to work in collaborative environments, tackle larger issues and approach them from multiple angles in a cross-disciplinary framework,” says Principal Investigator and head of the HRC, Associate Professor Debjani Ganguly.

“It will also help attune graduate students to the larger public contexts in which expert knowledge in the humanities is meaningful, and to equip them with the written and oral skills necessary to communicate with these public constituencies more effectively.”

The other universities which will share in the grant are the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. Over the three-year pilot program, each of the universities will host the program participants to look at different aspects of the interdisciplinary theme chosen for the project: indigeneity in transnational contexts.

This theme will be used to help meet another core goal of the project, which is to produce a scalable model of skills training and digital archiving for graduate researchers that can be applied in multiple contexts and to multiple themes across the humanities.

“There is a long and rich history of interdisciplinary humanities research in CASS, so this is a great opportunity to further the work we’re already doing here,” says Ganguly.

“We hope that this project will encourage more collaboration and interdisciplinary work internationally, so that the humanities can continue to stay relevant and continue to make significant contributions to society.”

A number of other projects will also be funded by the grant. You can read more about these projects here