About

In January 2014 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded USC a major grant designed to provide PhD candidates and post-doctoral fellows in the humanities with advanced skills relating to the digital humanities. Building on the success of USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded USC a second grant in July 2017 to develop the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Program.

The new program draws strength from experience, but points in new directions with new partners. It anticipates that digital technologies are an ubiquitous part of scholarship across humanities fields. It addresses the need for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty to develop mastery of specific skills that will enable them to conduct research with the highest levels of expertise and cutting-edge methods.

USC possesses a unique set of attributes that position it as a leader in the national and international discussion of the digital humanities. It is the home of a number of centers and institutes that bring together scholars—faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. students, and ambitious undergraduates—to work on common sets of intellectual concerns. Some of the prominent centers at USC Dornsife are the Shoah Foundation Institute, the Visual Studies Research Institute, the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures. In this sense, humanities scholarship at USC resembles large-scale scientific projects, which reach across disciplines in order to solve complex problems.

This second grant continues support for outstanding graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the humanities at the same time that it builds connections across the university. It strengthens the collaborations with the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Libraries and adds new partnerships with the USC Spatial Sciences Institute and the Claremont Colleges. The newly developed Humanities in a Digital World Program Summer Boot Camps offer week-long intensive training sessions taught by experts in multi-media rhetoric and visualization, GIS, and multi-media authoring in Scalar. The boot camps allow the expansion of access to expert training as they are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty at USC as well as those from the Claremont Colleges.

The Program will host two symposia at USC that will bring scholars from outside the university to share ideas and methodologies related to the specific use of digital technologies in the humanities, with a focus on creating and sustaining a critical mass of interest and attention toward digital humanities.

We aim to make digital humanities a key part of USC’s prominent leadership in graduate education in the humanities, establishing a model that integrates cutting-edge technologies and digital media directly into traditional humanities disciplines.