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Andrew W. Mellon East-Central European Research Fellows

Fellowships in the Humanities

From 1993 to 2010, the program of fellowships enabled Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian and Slovak scholars in the humanities and allied social sciences to carry out research at institutes of advanced study in other countries. Fellows were funded for short-term residencies at one of the seventeen designated institutes in Austria, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Turkey, and Yemen.

The fellowships were intended to serve younger scholars who had already obtained a Ph.D. or had equivalent experience and who wished to undertake a specific research project at one of the participating institutes. Each institute issued its own announcement and handled all matters concerning application and selection.

This initiative was coordinated by The Council of American Overseas Research Centers and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Participating Institutes

The following participating institutes received Andrew W. Mellon East-Central European Research Fellows.

  • American Academy in Rome (AAR)
  • American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR)
  • American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS)
  • American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS)
  • American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT)
  • American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)
  • Centre for Advanced Study (CAS)
  • Fondation Maison des Sciences de L'Homme (FMSH)
  • Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel (HAB)
  • Institute for Human Sciences (IWM)
  • Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS)
  • Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC)
  • The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH)
  • The Warburg Institute (WAR)
  • Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (VIT)
  • W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (AIAR)
  • Wissenschaftskolleg Zu Berlin (WSK)

 

Background

In the early 1990s, after the demise of communist regimes in East and Central Europe, one of the academic community’s most urgent priorities was to reconnect scholars in these countries with their counterparts in the West. This was especially important in the humanities disciplines, since scholars in these areas had been essentially cut off from contact with the West during the communist era. Focusing on the humanities also enabled us to address the bias being shown by public and private funding sources to support the fields of policy, economics, development, and natural sciences in East and Central Europe. To address this, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) an initial grant of $650,000 in June 1992 to establish and coordinate a program of residencies for East-Central European humanities scholars at institutes of advanced study in Western Europe. Subsequent grants (totaling $10.2 million) from the Mellon Foundation, as well as interest income generated from grant funds, enabled the Mellon Program to continue to award fellowships through 2010.

The Mellon Program was conceived as an initial step toward integrating younger (PhDs under 40 years old) Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak humanities scholars into the broader European academic community from which they had been effectively excluded during the previous four decades. At the request of the participating institutes, we later expanded the Mellon Program to include scholars from Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania.

The goals of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation East-Central European Research Fellows Program were to:

  • Reconnect scholars and re-establish scholarly communications between East/Central and West European scholars and institutions following the demise of communism in East and Central Europe;
  • Help these researchers create new networks in their home countries and throughout East and Central Europe; and
  • Develop “tripartite” collaborations among East, Central, and Western European scholars and institutions.

We structured the Mellon Program in a decentralized way, with implementation carried out primarily by the participating institutes and CAORC providing overall program uniformity, administration, financial management, and reporting. At first, we selected eight institutes to participate: the American Academy in Rome, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbuttel, Germany), Maison des Sciences de L’Homme (Paris), Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Villa I Tatti (Florence, Italy), The Warburg Institute (London, England), and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin, Germany). We later expanded the program to include the American Center for Oriental Research (Amman, Jordan), W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (Jerusalem, Israel), American Institute of Indian Studies (New Delhi, India), American Institute for Yemeni Studies (Sana’a, Yemen), American Research Institute in Turkey (Istanbul, Turkey), Council of Scientific Research (Madrid, Spain), Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh, Scotland), Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria), and Center for Advanced Study (Oslo, Norway).

In summer and fall 1993, the first 21 fellows began their three-month residencies at the eight participating institutes. In the final year of the program, 46 fellows held fellowships at 12 participating institutes. Overall, from 1993 through 2010, CAORC was able to award almost 700 fellowships to 600 East and Central European humanities scholars. Every year, each participating institute received far more qualified applications for fellowships than it could fulfill, primarily because the Mellon Program represented the only sustained opportunity for East-Central European scholars in the humanities and related social sciences to carry out intensive research through residencies at institutes of advanced study in and beyond Western Europe. It is a measure of both the program’s success and the participating institutes’ commitment to the program that some funded additional fellowships from the institutes’ own limited budgets for some of the unsuccessful applicants for the Mellon Program who nonetheless submitted impressive applications.

The first year of the Mellon Program, we awarded fellowships to scholars in Anthropology, Arab Studies, Archaeology, Art History, Assyriology, Classical Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature/Literary Studies, Philology, Philosophy, Post-Classical Humanistic Studies, and Sociology. Over the 17 years of the Mellon Program, the fields of scholars’ interest expanded to include Aesthetics, Architectural History, Biblical Studies, Business & International Studies, Byzantine Studies, Economics/Economic History, Education, Egyptology, Epigraphy, Ethnography, Ethnology, Ethnomusicology, Folklore, Gender Studies, Information Technology, Jewish Studies, Legal Studies, Musicology, Paleoanthropology, Political Science, Psycholinguistics, Semiotics, Theater Studies, Theology, Theory & History of Cinema, Thracology, and Turkic Studies.

The program continued to grow not only in the number of fellowships given annually, the number of eligible countries and participating institutes, and the range of scholarly fields, but also in the type and number of activities that developed beyond the initial contacts. These activities included seminars, exhibitions, joint excavations, publications, colloquia, working groups, partnerships, institutional co-sponsorships, and a wide variety of formal and informal exchanges, many of which CAORC was able to support via interest on monies invested. The wide range of intellectual diversity supported by the Mellon Program is reflected in the fellows’ fields, in their topic titles, and in the evolution of their work following their fellowships.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation East-Central European Research Fellows Program (Mellon Program) was successful in creating a paradigm shift in scholarship for East and Central Europe. It had far-reaching and long-lasting effects on the 600 fellows, their home institutions, the participating institutes, their geographical regions, and the international scholarly community

In summer 2007, CAORC convened a roundtable meeting of former Mellon fellows and participating institute representatives at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, to evaluate the Mellon Program at that point. The group identified the following as the Mellon Program’s greatest successes and unique services to humanities fields in East and Central Europe:

  • The program changed and increased our knowledge of the human record, especially in European prehistory, Byzantine, and Ottoman studies. Mellon fellows made major contributions to emerging fields, notably state formation and national identity.
  • The fellowships exposed East and Central European humanities scholars to the diversity of scholarship and types of institutions in the West, and subsequently raised the standards of scholarship and research in East and Central Europe.
  • The Mellon Program may have been the only program that linked U.S. and East and Central European scholars and institutions.
  • No other program provided European institutions with support for East and Central European scholars.
  • East and Central European scholars were exposed to “normal” standards and practices of scholarly study (e.g., research techniques, access to administrative support), and the program helped them develop academic resources in their own countries on their return.
  • The fellowships gave East and Central European scholars their first taste of freedom – to conduct research without obligations to institutions, free access to information, free use of libraries, and general and academic freedom.
  • The flexible post-fellowship aspect of the program helped connect fellows in their home countries.
  • Scholars in related fields became connected – and became connected to scholars in other disciplines.
  • As the program evolved to include additional centers in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries, Mellon funds were crucial in supporting seminars on interdisciplinary topics in those countries.
  • The program brought to the forefront important topics in the humanities and social sciences, with East and Central European scholars researching essential themes, generating new knowledge, and creating new collaborations.
  • Through the fellows’ work, they disseminated knowledge and understanding of East and Central European scholarship to the rest of the scholarly world.
  • The concept of an institute of advanced study is now familiar in East and Central European academia – and being used as a model.
  • Because most U.S. foundations and government agencies support only U.S. citizens, the Mellon fellows “internationalized” many overseas centers’ programs.
  • The Mellon Program gave young scholars access to resources they didn’t have in their home institutional libraries. Many of these scholars made copies of materials they could not access at their universities and took these materials back when they returned to East and Central Europe, enriching their home institutions.


 
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