The Cogut Center for the Humanities will use a nearly $500,000 grant awarded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation last December to fund an international humanities program.
The "Brown in the World/The World at Brown" program that the grant will fund involves two main divisions. For "The World at Brown" half of the program, the Cogut Center will host nine international scholars. These scholars will be selected by the governing board of the Cogut Center, according to Michael Steinberg, director of the center. The seminars they lead will be both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, so all students can benefit from the program, Steinberg added.
Under the "Brown in the World" portion of the program, select graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will be awarded stipends to spend semesters abroad, benefiting these students individually while also helping develop "partnerships with international institutions," Steinberg said.
The goal of the program — which will focus on graduate students but have an "indirect benefit" to undergraduates — will be to address internationalization and "educate in the global context," Steinberg said. The University as a whole has emphasized these issues in recent years, and "the Mellon Foundation is also interested in the same questions," Steinberg continued.
The program should be in effect by next fall, Steinberg said.
According to Steinberg, the "jewel in the crown" of this program will be its work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a youth orchestra composed of mostly Israeli and Arab musicians based in Seville, Spain. Brown will help the orchestra build a year-round academic institute in Berlin by forming a humanities program for the institute, Steinberg said. The space for this institute is currently being renovated.
"In a way, the most original program — because we're really inventing it — involves the program in Berlin," Steinberg said.
The grant is the latest of several that Brown has received from the Mellon Foundation, though it is the first of its kind. The Mellon Foundation has a "principle focus on the humanities" and has previously provided grants for graduate fellowships and workshops at Brown, Steinberg said.
"They have been increasing, I'm glad to say, over the last few years," he said.
The $497,990 grant comes shortly after the October announcement of the $3 million Humanities Initiative — funded by an anonymous gift — to further Brown's international perspective on humanities. Steinberg said the programs reflect Brown's commitment at a time when "most U.S. universities are slashing the humanities."
It is still unclear how this new program and the initiative will connect, but "the general purpose is exactly the same in both cases," Steinberg said.
