Cross-institutional opportunities for collaborative research, teaching, & the production of scholarship in the humanities

The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies is proud to be a member of the Andrew W. Mellon funded Humanities Without Walls consortium. 

In 2015, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $3,000,000 to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH)—now the Institute for Humanities Research—at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to fund the first two years of an extensive consortium of sixteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond. By leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses, the initiative, titled Humanities Without Walls, aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. The grant was renewed for an additional two years and has now been renewed for a third and final round.

Humanities Without Walls Consortial Seed Grants

As a member of the Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls project led by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Obermann Center has supported Seed Grants to prepare faculty to apply for the final Grand Research Challenge. Director Teresa Mangum is also happy to advise other faculty-led teams who wish to apply these grants. Successful teams will receive up to $150,000 for collaborative projects dedicated to “interdisciplinary, collaborative, research-based projects in the humanities and arts that build a clearly communicated commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution into their project design and proposal narratives, regardless of the research topic or theme they focus on.”

The topic is open and the teams can include faculty, staff, community partners, and colleagues from other colleges and universities, and must have a role for graduate students. To write a competitive application, it is crucial to review the rich materials about the goals for the grant provided by HWW.  

To learn more, contact us at obermann-center@uiowa.edu for an appointment with our director and representative to the HWW consortium, Teresa Mangum after carefully reading the materials on the HWW website about Proposal Development.

Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshops

Thirty Fellows from the humanities and social sciences will be chosen for the HWW Summer Workshop in Minneapolis July 17-28, 2023 will include sessions on values-based career planning, resume and cover letter construction, networking, social media strategies from experts in career development, and meetings with employers. 

Learn more about the 2023 workshop and apply.