Announcing IIE Graduate Fellowships for International Study with Funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Institute of International Education (IIE) will administer IIE Graduate Fellowships for International Study beginning July 1, to provide support for PhD dissertation research to approximately 80 students in the humanities whose funding has been lost due to recent significant reductions in federal spending. The IIE Graduate Fellowships will be awarded to students in the humanities, who make up about 80 of the 130 students who had been nominated to receive funding in 2011/12 through the U.S. Department of Education-funded Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program. After the spring 2011 budget cuts, funding for these fellowships was no longer available through the Department of Education.
A special one-time only grant of $3.16 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has enabled IIE to create these fellowships so that talented emerging scholars can conduct research overseas for six to 12 months, with the goal of advancing knowledge, research and teaching in non-western languages and area studies.
The Institute of International Education worked quickly with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create these fellowships, which will be awarded to students in the Mellon Foundation’s areas of focus, including humanities fields such as the arts, history, languages, and area studies, and zones of fields such as anthropology and geography that bridge the humanities and social sciences.
“It is essential that doctoral students continue to have access to this kind of international research opportunity despite reductions in federal spending. These experiences are absolutely critical to our future leaders, allowing them to integrate international language, content and cultures into their education, which will greatly benefit their research and teaching now and in the future,” said IIE president Allan E. Goodman.
In explaining the Foundation’s decision to lend one-time support, Don M. Randel, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation said, “The Fulbright-Hays program has long been an important investment in the national’s intellectual infrastructure. In today’s globalized world it should be regarded as more important than ever. Its precipitous suspension in the budget agreement for the fiscal year 2011 was thus a shock. In the hope that a wiser decision for funding will be reached for 2012 and beyond and so as not to throw into turmoil the plans of young scholars already nominated to receive awards, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has committed funds to support scholars in the humanities and closely related fields for this year alone. I hope that funds will be found to support scholars in other fields as well. We cannot, of course, undertake to make good any loss in federal support for the future, however valuable we believe the program to be.”
For more information, visit www.iie.org.
Are you considering a Ford Fellowship? If not, perhaps you should be! Ford Foundation seeks to increase the diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, to maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and to increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.
