The Humanities Corridor

Syracuse University, Cornell University and University of Rochester to develop Humanities Corridor with grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Beginning last summer Humanities scholars in Central New York started discussions about ways they might strengthen and enhance scholarship in their disciplines. More than 40 representatives from the three local AAU-member institutions (Syracuse, Cornell, and Rochester) were involved in this collaboration, which led to a proposal that was submitted to the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in fall 2005 to create The Central New York Humanities Corridor. At the end of the year Mellon responded positively to the proposal, granting a four-year, $1 million grant to the three institutions, which will be administered by Gerry Greenberg, associate dean for humanities in The College of Arts & Sciences.  

The Corridor will enhance the academic profile of humanities in the region by connecting the teaching and research strengths of scholars at the three AAU-member universities through inter-institutional partnerships. It hopes to build on existing partnerships that have been created and fostered in the past and to facilitate new ones, which will promote research done by scholars and enhance graduate programs at the three schools. Now that the grant has been received, participants from these schools will return to the task of planning how best to develop these partnerships

The Corridor will initially focus on five thematic clusters of traditional humanities as collectively identified by deans, directors and faculty at each university: philosophy and linguistics; religions and cultures; the interface between the humanities and science/technology; visual arts and cultures; and music history/musicology. Each cluster reflects an area of scholarly strength, as well as doctoral priority, at two or more of the institutions.

The inter-institutional involvement over the first four years will take the form of collaborative research and group conversations among participating humanities faculty in each cluster; funded interdisciplinary workshops and conferences; and consortial faculty exchanges among the schools.

Work on these initiatives will begin this semester, and while there will be a certain level of central coordination, each group will be working on their own initiatives at their own pace. The Mellon grant will also help support the technology investments needed to continue to connect the faculty and resources at the Corridor schools beyond the four-year commitment.

The development of this corridor among these universities reflects a commitment by each institution to reinvigorate the humanities, both in research activity and doctoral training. At SU, Chancellor Nancy Cantor also recently committed to developing a new Humanities Center on campus, to be housed in the historic Tolley Building and scheduled to open for the Spring 2007 semester.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a private, not-for-profit corporation headquartered in New York City, regularly makes grants that support a wide range of initiatives to strengthen selective research universities in the United States, with particular emphasis on the humanities and "humanistic" social sciences. The foundation's interests in this area include (but are not limited to) doctoral education, post-doctoral fellowships, faculty research support and discipline-related projects.