Established in the 1988/1989 academic year, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is committed to broadening the range of scholarly perspectives in the US academy, with a focus on the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Its name honors Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the noted African American educator, statesman, minister, former president of Morehouse College, and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Founded with an initial cohort of eight member institutions, the program has grown to include 47 programs, including three consortia.
To date, the program has produced more than 1,200 PhDs, more than 800 of whom are currently college professors. Numerous others have taken their valuable 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 programs that emphasize mentoring, research support, and student cohort building, Mellon partners with member colleges and universities to identify and support students of great promise and to help them become scholars and professionals of the highest distinction.

MMUF is proud of its legacy of leading scholars whose perspectives greatly enrich research and teaching in their fields.
 

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.

Tamara Walker, Ph.D, Faculty Coordinator (on sabbatical 2025-2026)

Lisa Jahn, Ph.D., Interim Faculty Coordinator

Jody Dublin, Ed.D, Administrative Coordinator

Milan O. Taylor, Graduate Mentor

Catalina Arriaga

Catalina Arriaga is a junior history major whose work focuses on colonialism, empires, and twentieth-century Mexico. Her research examines citizenship and border imperialism in the United States and Israel, situating both within longer histories of settler colonialism and imperial expansion. She emphasizes how the very conception of the citizen has historically depended on practices of othering that legitimize exclusion, displacement, and violence. By tracing how states entwine legality with morality and legitimacy through militarized borders, surveillance, and architectures of exclusion, Catalina highlights the structural ways nation-states preserve hierarchies of belonging.

At the same time, Catalina’s project turns to revolutionary movements such as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which contest legal classifications like citizenship and propose radical alternatives to state-centered belonging. Her work emphasizes how these movements reimagine autonomy and collective identity, while also pointing toward ways to autonomously grow collectives built on longevity and interdependence beyond the nation-state.

Thandiwe Baker

Thandiwe Baker is a junior studying history. Currently, she is working on a research project documenting the development of real and imagined solidarities between Ireland and Jamaica during the post-colonial period, with a specific focus on leaders such as Marcus Garvey. Her other interests include Black radical thought, and topics in Middle Eastern studies. Outside of MMUF, Thandiwe serves as a deputy editor for the Columbia Daily Spectator, covering West Harlem for the city news section, and is an editor for Roots, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnic Studies magazine.

Sekna Bazzi

Sekna (she/her) is a rising third-year undergraduate student studying History and Economics at Barnard College. She is a first-generation, low-income student from Newark, New Jersey—the center of her research. Through the interdisciplinary lens of Economic History, Sekna is researching the 1967 Newark Riots, a four-day rebellion in immediate response to the unjust beating and arrest of a black cab driver by white police officers. She plans to highlight both the lived experiences of Newark residents by conducting an oral history and complementing these findings with a quantitative analysis on Newark’s economy since the 1950s. Outside of her research, Sekna is devoted to organizing for economically disenfranchised students, as evidenced by her mutual aid work and as co-president of Columbia’s First-Generation, Low-Income (FLI) Network. Sekna has presented on her mutual aid work both at the Northeastern Food and Farm Justice Conference and the TEDxBarnard showcase. Sekna has been the recipient of Barnard College’s Emerging Star Award, Zwas Community Impact Fellowship, Athena Scholars Fellowship, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Through her research and activism, Sekna hopes to continue driving economic justice for marginalized communities.

Bria Dominici

Bria Dominici (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Environment and Sustainability and double-minoring in Science, Public Policy and Ethics (SPPE) & Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (F/ISTS). Alongside MMUF, she is a 2025 Udall Scholar, Roosevelt Institute Emerging Fellow and Environmental Science Pathways Scholar. Her work is shaped by an enduring commitment to grassroots organizing, storytelling, and the power of collective care. Outside of Barnard, you can find her working at the Youth Activist-Youth Allies Network.

Isabella Hernandez

Isabella (she/her) is a senior 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.

Jezlyn Montas

Jezlyn Montas (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College, majoring in Psychology with a minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her Mellon Mays research investigates how Black creative practices such as spoken word and poetry function as tools for liberation and sources of intergenerational healing across the diaspora. As a spoken word artist herself, she is passionate about exploring how art nurtures resilience, and collective care. Jezlyn is also a 2024 Laidlaw Scholar who explored how poetry slams function as sites of epistemic violence and epistemic agency.  As an educator at Columbia University’s Double Discovery Center, she also designed and led a spoken word course where she guided 15 students in examining how their life experiences are shaped by the intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and class.

Chloe Moya

Chloe Moya (she/her) is a member of the Class of 2027 double majoring in Art History and Neuroscience. Her research explores the cultural, social, and political significance of the Chicano Mural Movement, with a focus on the often-overlooked roles of women as artists, organizers, and community supporters. She is passionate about arts education and community-based art, contributing through her mural practice and teaching students of all ages. On campus, she serves as Community Outreach Chair for CUAmarte, is the Treasurer of Ballet Folklórico Cielito Azul, and a Barnard Student Admissions Representative. As a first-generation low-income Mexican-American student, Chloe is dedicated to fostering accessible and inclusive spaces for creative expression and cultural preservation.

Christina Sarbanes

Christina Sarbanes is a senior majoring in Africana Studies. Their Mellon Mays project examines female masculinity in African American communities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular focus on style and dress in queer culture. Style is studied as both a site of resistance and a strategy for navigating structures of oppression, illuminating how gender, sexuality, and race are expressed and contested. Their research also engages with archival silences, working to recover overlooked narratives of African American queer life and to foreground the political power of adornment, presentation, and self-styling.

Alongside academic research, Christina has pursued commitments to food justice through the SIT Food Systems, Sustainability, and Justice study abroad program, a Projects for Peace grant establishing a community breakfast program and outdoor kitchen in West Baltimore, and work on urban food justice initiatives centered on gardening and equitable access to food.

Skylar Schiltz-Rouse

Skylar Schiltz-Rouse is a member of Barnard College’s Class of 2027, studying medical anthropology. As a Black American who attended Chinese immersion school from a young age, then moved to China and eventually India, she frequently found herself asking questions about “borderlands” and what it means to embody a multicultural identity. This led her to be interested in what can be learned from borderland communities with a specific focus on agrarian cultures and practices present along the Himalayan border region. Her work delves into what cultural preservation and conservation efforts in the Himalayan region seem to encompass, in relation to the influx of young adults migrating from rural areas within this region to find more commercial opportunities.

Reese Taylor

Reese Taylor is a junior majoring in Philosophy, History, and Human Rights. As a Mellon Mays Fellow, she intends to pursue research at the intersection of History and Human Rights. Specifically, how attempts to secure Human Rights but then ultimately Civil Rights for Black Americans in the 20th Century, shaped the role of Black education. Reese is ultimately interested in legal academic scholarship. Beyond Mellon Mays, Reese is a Laidlaw Scholar who founded The Voices in Action Initiative, a program cultivating public speaking, debate, and advocacy skills in Black youth. She also teaches Introduction to Law at Columbia's Double Discovery Center.