Limited Submission Opportunity: Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Program

Applications due Nov. 6, 2025

Vanderbilt University may submit up to three concept papers to the Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Program: 2026 Call for Concepts.

Overview

In the interest of maintaining a grantmaking portfolio that supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import, the Higher Learning program at the Mellon Foundation invites ideas for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the two areas listed below:

• Unruly Intelligences
  • The emergence of generative AI has triggered a firestorm of techno-utopian promises and apocalyptic predictions alike. These reckonings often imply that AI is “intelligent” in the human sense, even though from the iconic use of this term in his 1950 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Alan Turing called this attitude “dangerous” and famously defined artificial intelligence only in terms of how well computers could imitate human thought. Are we now facing an existential abdication of human capacities to machines? Or the usual evolution of how we define intelligence in keeping with our shifting technologies? Meanwhile, the terms of human and more-than-human intelligences are also unstable, with greater or lesser value assigned to particular populations, species, and objects according to our historical, social, and ecological contexts. How might different forms of AI – generative, predictive, agentic, and others, including models that are currently still theoretical – complicate or exacerbate the inequalities that arise from these norms? With so much at stake, the humanities have an urgent role to play in shaping contemporary understanding of artificial and other intelligences – and in making practical, informed recommendations about how to regulate and/or adopt AI in our learning, work, and most intimate lives. Projects might investigate:
    • the meanings of intelligence;
    • the effects of different conceptions of intelligence on (or their emergence from) democratic processes, human subjectivities, probability and prediction, and aesthetic and cultural taste;
    • the social and cultural impacts of specific forms of AI, as seen through discrete analytical or disciplinary lenses (such as disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental justice studies, and ethnic studies); or
    • any of the above, using comparative analyses that address how computational and non-computational understandings of intelligence take into account, for example, attention, dignity, embodiment, expertise, faith, justice, pleasure, serendipity, and surprise.
• Normalization and Its Discontents
  • The concept of normalcy is paradoxical. It entails the statistically average that is at the same time a moral imperative, a completely ordinary state that is nonetheless much to be desired, a cultural ideal. Moreover, the normal often functions as the ideal even when it is not numerically average. Despite the seemingly universal character of these formulations, the normal entered Western consciousnesses only in the modern era with the nineteenth-century efflorescence of statistics, bringing with it its opposite: the deviant, exceptional, aberrant, not normal. How does the concept of normalcy govern notions of human life, and when doesn’t it? What are the structures and systems that keep it in place, in realms as disparate as the aesthetic, socioeconomic, psychological, physiological, political, spiritual, and ethical? What, if anything, does the historical knowledge of its recent invention – and vigorous social rejections – enable? Projects might investigate:

• • • comparative historical, geographic, and/or cultural treatments of the normal;
    • normalcy and political contestation;
    • the import of the normal within specific disciplinary approaches;
    • the unspeakable, the taboo, and other deviances surreptitiously produced by a norm; or
    • potential relationships between the normal and the utopian.

Award Information: $250,000–$500,000 for up to four years. No indirect costs are allowed. Mellon anticipates allocating up to $10 million for this call for concepts.

Eligibility & Criteria

The Principal Investigator, or applicant, must be a faculty member and/or dean in a program or department in the humanities or humanistic social sciences at the applicant institution. The PI may also be the institution’s provost/chief academic officer, and should have the support of the institution’s senior academic leadership. For eligible fields of study, see pg. 10 of the guidelines.

Allowed Expenditures: Grant awards may be used for purposes such as (but not limited to):

• Course releases for participating faculty (alternatively, faculty stipends or salary supplements will be considered on a case-by-case basis)
• Course development funds
• Funds for the implementation of experimental projects
• Funds to support costs associated with workshops and reading, discussion, and/or action groups
• Travel and convening expenses, such as speaker honoraria, catering, and caregiving expenses
• Undergraduate research fellowships/stipends
• Equipment necessary to the undertaking of the project (see Disallowed Expenditures in guidelines for exceptions)
• Up to 10 percent of funds to program operational administrative and occupancy costs directly tied to the grant-funded activities

Timeline: The selected nominees must submit a Mellon registration form by Dec. 1, 2025. The deadline for submission of concepts is Feb. 17, 2025. The Mellon Higher Learning team will review all submissions and invite a small number of the most promising ones to be developed into full proposals for potential grant funding. Full proposal invitations will be issued during summer 2026.

See the guidelines for more information.

Internal Submission Instructions

Application Materials

To apply for this internal competition, please prepare and submit the following:

1. Two-Page Project Description which includes a discussion of:
   1. The focus area to which you are applying
   2. Ideas for a potential project, including the rationale and specific activities it might involve.
   3. The necessity of the planned work and its goals and potential impact
   4. Fitness of the institution and/or network to the proposed work.
   5. A brief, summary budget identifying estimated total amount and how the funds will be utilized (if necessary, can be included on separate page)
2. One-two page CV/Resume
3. Optional Statement of Support

Interested faculty should visit https://vanderbilt.infoready4.com/#freeformCompetitionDetail/1997714 to submit an application for the internal LSO competition and to find additional information about the opportunity. The deadline for the internal competition is Nov. 6, 2025.

Any questions about this opportunity or the LSO process may be directed to VU-LSO@vanderbilt.edu.