Mellon Foundation awards UCLA $1.35 million to fund humanities initiatives

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded UCLA $1.35 million to support curricular initiatives in the humanities. “These grants will enable us to build on existing curricular innovation in the Humanities at UCLA and lay the foundation for future transformation,” said David Schaberg, interim dean of Division of Humanities.

The English department has been granted $650,000 to create a new curriculum for literatures in English. The Department of Classics will utilize $700,000 to develop the UCLA Renaissance Latin Program, which will be administered in conjunction with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The new Literatures in English curriculum will use curricular and pedagogical strategies to encompass current and emerging areas of scholarship. Central to this effort will be instructional innovations tied to the new curriculum as well as a new teaching assistants’ training program.

“The landscape of literary studies has evolved,” noted Ali Behdad, professor and chair of the English department. “We are grateful that Mellon’s support has enabled us to reflect this shift by making these innovative changes.”

The grant to the Department of Classics will help to launch the UCLA Renaissance Latin Program, which will train young scholars in the principal literary, scholarly and scientific language of the Early Modern period. According to Shane Butler, professor of classics, interest in Renaissance Latin has surged in recent years, but young Latin scholars have been limited by a lack of modern translations and in-depth training in this specialist field. UCLA is in a unique position to address this need, with its established strength in Latin, its renowned Classics Department and one of the nation’s most vibrant communities of Renaissance Latin scholars.