(NEW YORK, NY — January 24, 2023) The Mellon Foundation—the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture and humanities—today announced more than $12 million in funding to support twenty-six colleges and universities across the nation mounting social justice-related research or curricular projects.

The grants are the result of Mellon’s Higher Learning inaugural open call—announced in Spring 2022 as a means of continuing to support inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import.  The open call invited proposals from institutions exploring three distinct topical categories—Civic Engagement and Voting Rights, Race and Racialization in the United States, and Social Justice and the Literary Imagination—in an effort to help illuminate the significance of voting rights controversies in US history from numerous humanities perspectives; demonstrate the complex import of race and racialization within US culture and society; and highlight the role of the literary imagination in making and remaking worlds and societies, past and present.

“This call is designed to highlight the essential role of the humanities—including those disciplines concerned with the interpretation of expressive culture—in addressing our society’s most…