FAQ - MSI Humanities Leadership Academy
What counts as a humanities-based discipline?
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation prioritizes fields focused on human culture, expression, history, ethics, and interpretation, rather than disciplines driven primarily by empirical measurement, experimentation, or policy analysis.
Core humanities fields supported by the Mellon Foundation include: history, philosophy, languages and literature, classics, religious studies, art history, musicology, performance and media studies, cultural and area studies, gender and sexuality studies, rhetoric, and humanistic archaeology.
Mellon also supports select social science fields, such as anthropology, sociology, political theory, human geography, science and technology studies, legal studies, and education, when the work is historical, interpretive, critical, or theoretical in approach.
However, the foundation generally does not fund: quantitative economics, psychology (outside of historical or theoretical work), policy evaluation, behavioral or experimental social sciences, or STEM fields unless they are clearly embedded within a humanities-driven inquiry.
