With Mellon grant, launches ‘Humanities for the Public Good’

The Southern Oral History Program, in collaboration with Carolina Public Humanities’ Carolina K-12 program, hosted the Carolina Oral History Teaching Fellows in Civil Rights workshop at UNC in June.

A four-year, $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will significantly advance Carolina’s efforts in humanities education, research and teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The initiative, “Humanities for the Public Good,” will use multiple strategies to integrat

e public humanities into the curriculum, tap the potential of digital technology for humanities scholarship and teaching, and reach out to diverse communities to elevate awareness of existing humanities activities at Carolina as well as foster new avenues of public engagement.

The principal investigator of the grant is Terry Rhodes, senior associate dean for fine arts and humanities in the College. Robyn Schroeder, who oversaw several public humanities efforts at Brown University, will manage the grant’s programmatic elements as initiative director.

It will focus on three broad themes:

Employing new educational models for the humanities that reconfigure education and promote the public humanities in the curriculum.
Integrating contemporary, digital approaches into research and education.
Expanding the public humanities through more engagement with diverse communities beyond the academy.

“What is exciting about this initiative is that it is a natural evolution of Carolina’s identity as a university ‘of the public and for the public,’” Rhodes said. “This grant will allow us to meaningfully advance the theme of ‘humanities for the public good’ in ways that will benefit our students and faculty enormously.”