Gustavus Receives Grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Gustavus Adolphus College has been awarded a three-year, $100,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The College plans to use the funding to support the development of January term courses for students in their second year. These specially devised courses will focus on the core components of the liberal arts, first introduced to students in the First Term Seminar (FTS), and the increasingly fundamental role that digital humanities play in liberal learning.

These January-term courses will function as a foundational liberal arts focused arch between the First-Term Seminar and their final years to graduation and the completion of the B.A. degree. The grant will also provide resources to enhance our overall commitment to the digital humanities and enable faculty to teach more courses in this burgeoning field.

“We are very excited about the possibilities for these seminars. They will offer students an opportunity to develop through their coursework a reflective, integrative, and more focused understanding of the connections and possibilities underlying a liberal arts degree. This will be immensely helpful as students move toward graduation and beyond. These seminars, like our longtime offering of a second general education curriculum, 3 Crowns, are part of what makes Gustavus innovative and a model for other colleges,” said Paula O’Loughlin, Associate Provost and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Gustavus.

“The project-based and interdisciplinary courses developed through this grant will enable students to conduct research using cutting-edge digital humanities sources and methods,” said Alisa Rosenthal, Gustavus Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Kendall Center for Engaged Learning. “The reflection and values embedded in the planned courses will ensure that students understand these projects in the context of their own particular educational paths and within the liberal arts more generally.”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was founded in 1969 by Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon. The Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies. To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. The Foundation appropriated more than $235 million in grants in 2013.