Offered from 2010–2020, The A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at UW-Madison was an interdisciplinary program that provided postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it provided two-year postdoctoral fellowships for recent PhD recipients. The program built upon interdisciplinary initiatives on campus exploring the broad question, “What is human?” These initiatives examined the transnational circulations of culture and power on a global landscape, questions of biocultures and biopolitics, and new ways of thinking about media in the context of the digital revolution.
Each year, the A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Program invited applications under a theme related to these initiatives. The themes were World Citizenship (2010-11), Life (2011-12), Media (2012-13), Democracy (2013-14), Religion and Secularism (2014-15), Violences (2015-16), Climates and Natures (2016-18), Translation, Adaptation, Transplantation (2017-19), and Truth, Fact, and Ways of Knowing (2018–20).
The A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Program was affiliated with the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows were members of the Institute for Research in the Humanities and were also affiliated with a humanities or humanistic social science department in the College of Letters & Science, where they taught a total of three courses over two years with no teaching in the first semester of the fellowship.
Each year, the program invited three new fellows to UW-Madison for two-year appointments. The fellows had offices in 432 East Campus Mall, the home of the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities, as well as access to UW-Madison’s world-class libraries and campus facilities. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows were invited to participate in any of the campus’s many conferences, lectures, seminars, workshops, and other events sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. (See humanities.wisc.edu and irh.wisc.edu) for programs and events.) Fellows were also welcome to attend the Institute’s weekly Monday seminars (3:30-5:00 pm) and Tuesday follow-up lunch seminars (noon-1:15 pm) and join the stimulating community of fellows for ongoing informal exchanges.