Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Read more about the program in Barnard news: Achieving Academia
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
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.
About the MMUF program at Barnard College
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 2024 MMUF Application deadline is January 26, 2024, 11:59 PM. Begin your application for the 2024 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.
Selection Criteria and Eligible Fields of Study
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.
Additional criteria are weighed in selection of participants in MMUF:
- Academic promise;
- Interest in pursuing graduate education, especially a PhD, in an eligible discipline of the humanities or humanistic social sciences (a list of eligible fields can be viewed below);
- Potential for serving as a mentor and teacher for a wide variety of students;
- Activities and leadership that reflect an interest in social justice issues and the promotion of multivocality;
- Availability for, and commitment to, full and enthusiastic participation in all aspects of the MMUF program, including attendance at conferences and regular meetings;
- Response to a short essay prompt about how the applicant’s life experiences and academic goals would contribute to furthering the goal of a diverse academy; and
- Status as a US citizen or permanent resident. Students who are undocumented or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients may apply if it is consistent with their institution’s policies.
To be eligible for selection as an MMUF fellow, students must be planning to study in one or more of these fields:
- Anthropology and archaeology
- Area/cultural/ethnic/gender studies
- Art history
- Classics
- Geography and population studies
- English
- Film, cinema, and media studies (theoretical focus)
- Musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory
- Foreign languages and literatures
- History
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Performance studies (theoretical focus)
- Philosophy and Political Theory
- Religion and theology
- Sociology
- Theater (theoretical focus)
- Interdisciplinary studies: Interdisciplinary areas of study may be eligible if they have one or more eligible fields at their core, but must be approved by the MMUF staff at the Mellon Foundation on a case-by-case basis. Please note that interdisciplinary education graduate programs, even those that incorporate one or more eligible fields, are not eligible for MMUF graduate benefits.
Fellowship Program Components
Research and mentorship are the center of the Mellon Mays Program. During their time in the program, fellows learn how to conceive and carry out a long-term research project, which often becomes their senior thesis or is related to that project. Using Barnard resources such as the Milstein Library Staff, Writing and Speaking Programs, the Center for Engaged Pedagogy, and the Digital Humanities Center, fellows learn online and archival research techniques, strategies for creating a productive and realistic writing practice, innovative ways in which to present research to multiple audiences, as well as goal setting and time-management techniques. Fellows work closely with their faculty mentors throughout the academic year to refine their research topics and ideas. In addition, fellow research projects are workshopped at least once a semester to help students maintain momentum.
Mellon Mays fellows earn course credit for their participation in the program: 1.5 points each semester they are on campus (6 points total if entering in the sophomore year). Fellows also receive research stipends of $2000 for each semester they participate in the program and $4500 for research in both their sophomore and junior year summers.
MMUF fellows meet with the faculty and administrative coordinators, graduate student mentors, and invited guests frequently to discuss ongoing research, the process of applying to graduate school, diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in the academy, and other topics such as the joys and challenges of academic life as a student of color and/or woman or gender non-conforming person.
In the summer following their admission to the program, all Mellon Fellows participate in an intensive colloquium which is an introduction to academic life, advanced research methods, and the support available to fellows through the MMUF program. Over the course of the workshop fellows develop an annotated bibliography and literature review related to their research topic. They do this in consultation with Barnard MMUF alums currently in PhD programs who come back to campus to serve as graduate mentors.
Additional workshops during the week include: research methods and technology with Barnard/Columbia research librarians, Academic Careers and Trajectories, Barnard College Writing and Speaking Fellows, applying to graduate school, an “Academic Journey” talk with a current professor, and a wellness workshop. Barnard MMUF alums lead discussions on their graduate school experiences and strategies for thriving and meeting challenges.
In the summer between their junior and senior years, fellows are funded to conduct research or to participate in one of a number of research programs in the United States and abroad. Our students have visited archives in New York, France, and South Korea; participated in The Critical Language Scholarship Programs, and learned other languages at universities in the US and abroad. They have conducted research with faculty mentors at other universities in the US and abroad; they have also organized their own research trips to other parts of the United States, India, Thailand, Brazil, China, England, Ghana, and many other places around the world.
The heart of the Mellon Program is the mentoring relationship each fellow establishes with the faculty member with whom they select in the junior and senior years. Mentors provide both academic guidance and insight into life as an academic. A Mellon fellow may:
- pursue independent research under the direction of the faculty mentor,
- work as a research assistant on a project that the faculty mentor is currently pursuing;
- or, work on curricular or teaching projects of interest to the faculty mentor or that are related to the fellows’ ongoing research.
The Barnard MMUF program also assists its fellows in the graduate school application process by providing advice on suitable graduate programs, supervising the application process, as well as supplementing testing and application fees. The MMUF coordinators also encourage students to apply to the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers, which helps students prepare for graduate school applications. Barnard Mellon Fellows are also required to take a MMUF-funded GRE preparation course.
Fellows attend scholarly conferences, including the local New York Regional Undergraduate Mellon Conference held each spring; they plan and participate in the annual Barnard Mellon Mays Distinguished Lecture or, in 2023 the MMUF Alum Symposium.
Program Administrators
Monica Miller, Ph.D, Faculty Coordinator
Jody Dublin, Ed.D, Administrative Coordinator
Autumn Galindo, Graduate Mentor