Established in 1988 to address the barriers that result in the problem of underrepresentation in the faculty ranks of higher education, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is committed to supporting a diverse professoriate and to promoting the value of multivocality in the humanities and related disciplines, elevating accounts, interpretations, and narratives that expand present understandings. Its name honors Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the noted African American educator, statesman, minister, and former president of Morehouse College.

Founded with an initial cohort of eight member institutions, the program has grown to include forty-seven member schools and three consortia, including the UNCF consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Thus far the program has produced more than 1,100 PhDs, almost 800 of whom are currently college professors and 300 of whom have taken their humanities training into venues ranging from museums and nonprofit organizations to publishing houses and government positions. At any given time, about 800 MMUF fellows are enrolled in PhD programs, while the fellowship supports approximately 500 undergraduate students each year.

Through a pipeline process that emphasizes mentoring, research support, programming, and student cohort building, Mellon partners with member colleges and universities to identify and support students of great promise and help them become scholars and professionals of the highest distinction.

MMUF is proud of its legacy of field-transforming scholars whose diverse perspectives greatly enrich the experiences of their students.

Barnard College has been a steadfast supporter of MMUF—over 25 cohorts of fellows have been mentored at Barnard by dedicated faculty and administrators. Barnard’s Mellon Mays program has been very successful— as of 2022, we have twenty alums who have earned the PhD and ten others currently in graduate school. Our fellows have won national fellowships for graduate study from the Beinecke Scholarship, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among others.

Each year, we select a cohort of undergraduate fellows eager to join their fellow Barnard alums in the pursuit of scholarly careers. An information session is typically held late fall, and students apply in the spring of their sophomore year. 

The 2025 MMUF Application deadline is January 24, 2025, 11:59 PM. Begin your application for the 2025 MMUF.

Distinguished faculty and administrators have worked with this program since its inception at Barnard in 1996.  Over the years, professors Christopher Baswell, Rosalind Rosenberg, and Monica Miller have had the honor of mentoring Mellon fellows as the program's Faculty Director.  They worked with Deans Vivian Taylor, Michelle Tollinchi-Michel, Nikki Youngblood Giles, as well as Beyond Barnard advisors and mentors Lindsay Granger-Weaver and Jody Dublin as administrative coordinators of the program. 

» See the programs our alumnae have successfully pursued

In order to be eligible for MMUF, students must first be enrolled at one of the MMUF member institutions. The fellowship is not awarded directly to individual students; instead, the Mellon Foundation awards grants to the program’s member institutions, which then select fellows and administer the program on each campus.

Students must formally apply to their campus MMUF program to be considered for selection as fellows. The application process generally includes a written statement of purpose, a reflection on the ways the applicant’s life experiences and academic aspirations would contribute to furthering the goal of a diverse academy, one or more recommendations from faculty members, an academic transcript, an interview with the selection committee, and other requirements according to each institution’s procedures.

Fellows are generally chosen in the spring of their sophomore year after their majors have been declared, though there is some variation from institution to institution. In a few cases, and with prior consultation with Mellon, fellows have been selected as juniors or seniors.

MMUF is part of the Higher Learning program of the Mellon Foundation and reflects one of its three grantmaking priorities:

Elevating the knowledge that informs more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience and lays the foundation for more just and equitable futures.

Higher Learning makes grants with the objective of amplifying perspectives and contributions that have been marginalized within the conventional scholarly record, and that promote the realization of a more socially just world. We call this objective multivocality, and this commitment is at the core of MMUF.

Student applicants to MMUF will be evaluated on the basis of their prior coursework, their plans for a major, and their potential to bring historically marginalized or underrepresented perspectives to the academy, including by producing scholarly research that reflects and satisfies the above-stated goal of the Higher Learning program.

Some research themes and rubrics that may satisfy this goal include, but are not limited to, the following: historical and contemporary treatments of race, racialization, and racial formation; intersectional experience and analysis; gender and sexuality; Indigenous history and culture; questions about diaspora; coloniality and decolonization; the carceral state; migration and immigration; urban inequalities; social movements and mass mobilizations; the transatlantic slave trade; settler colonial societies; and literary accounts of agency, subjectivity, and community. While it is not required that student applicants work within the above or related rubrics, preference may be given to applicants who do.

Cat Flores: Cat (they/them) is a senior at Barnard from Los Angeles studying global history with a minor in art history. Their research interests include Chicana feminist art and print culture, Afro-Latinidad, and queer culture in the Caribbean. Outside of MMUF, Cat enjoys working at Barnard’s Wellness Spot as a Peer Educator and visiting the American Museum of Natural History where they interned last semester. Additionally, Cat is currently reading The House of Spirits, and they love to bike along the Hudson at sunset, shoot photos on their film camera and spend long hours in art museums. 

Chloie Plumber: Chloie (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College and she is majoring in Urban Studies with a concentration in Africana Studies. Her research project is an exploration of prisons as urban environments and how people who are incarcerated within these urban environments aim to enact their right to the city –defined as marginalized people attempting to transform urban spaces. She will use the Attica Prison Uprising (1971) as a case study to apply urban theory. By including incarcerated people in Urban Studies, she hopes to prove that once the most oppressed people can claim their right to the city, it will belong to us all. Chloie can also be found in various campus spaces in her role as Head Speaking Fellow.  

Christina Sarbanes: Christina (she/her)  is a junior at Barnard College majoring in Africana Studies, with a focus on urban food systems, food justice, and food apartheid in Black American communities. She draws inspiration from the Black Panther Party's survival programs, particularly the Free Breakfast Program. Her research interests center on local initiatives and revolutionary movements that address food insecurity and community empowerment. Christina serves on the executive board of the Mixed Heritage Society and writes the newsletter for the Gotham Food Pantry, where she highlights issues related to food access and justice in urban settings.

Diya-Sivan Reddy: Diya (she/her) is a senior at Barnard studying sociology. Her research focuses on how skin color plays a role in shaping the dating preferences of South Asian Americans which she is currently writing a thesis on. Diya works as a creative writing fellow at the Barnard Writing Center and is interning at the Guggenheim Museum doing Culture & Inclusion work. 

Hannah Sanghvi: Hannah is a senior at Barnard majoring in American Studies and Environmental Science. Hannah researches geographic order as a means of state violence in controlling and surveilling gender/caste/religion in tawaif communities with a focus on intersectional historical and spatial analysis of the Hindutva project. Outside of Mellon, Hannah works as a research assistant for the Barnard Center for Research on Women, trains in Kathak dance, and is passionate about transformative justice and community accountability. 

Isabella Hernandez: Isabella (she/her) is a junior sociology major with a minor in psychology at Barnard College. She serves as a Research Assistant to Professor Nora Gross, supporting an ethnographic study on the impact of gun violence on Black adolescent boys in urban schools. Her research examines how gender roles shift or persist within working-class Latinx immigrant families following immigration, exploring critical themes of diaspora, assimilation, socioeconomic need, and cultural preservation. By analyzing how these families navigate cultural tradition in new societal contexts, her work aims to contribute to understanding identity preservation and social integration in immigrant communities. 

Rosie Juma: Rosie (she/her) is majoring in Africana Studies and minoring in Education Studies. Her research focuses on how adopting the language of Kiswahili contributes to a sense of autonomy and psychological liberation for Black people within the American context. To understand this, Rosie also examines the loss of indigenous African languages during enslavement and the importance of decentering English for Black Americans. In addition to being a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Rosie is an intern at the Justice-In-Education Initiative and a Head Writing Fellow at the Barnard Writing Center.  

Thandiwe Knox: Thandiwe (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Ancient Studies and minoring in Art History. Her research interests include reception and race in the Ancient Mediterranean through surviving material works. She is currently an intern at Strada as a curatorial intern and acts as a research assistant to Ellen Morris on the online bibliography, "Race and Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean".