The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is committed to broadening the range of scholarly perspectives in the US academy, with a focus on the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program is dedicated to creating pathways to the U.S. academy and shaping the future of the humanities.
The University of Southern California’s MMUF program is a partnership between the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences and the Office of the Provost. For more information on other Mellon Mays Programs click here.
USC’s MMUF program aims to identify qualified undergraduate students who might choose to pursue an academic path to Ph.D. programs in the humanities or humanistic social sciences in one of the following areas of exploration, or similar fields:
- historical and contemporary treatments of race/racialization and racial formation;
- intersectional experience and analysis;
- gender and sexuality;
- Indigenous history and culture;
- questions about diaspora;
- coloniality and decolonization;
- the carceral state;
- migration and immigration;
- urban inequalities and ethnographies;
- social movements and mass mobilizations;
- the transatlantic slave trade;
- settler colonial societies;
- racial disparities and outcomes;
- and literary and philosophical accounts of agency, subjectivity, and community, among other areas.
Forty-seven programs, including three consortia participate in MMUF. According to the Mellon website: To date, the program has produced more than 1,200 PhDs, more than 800 of whom are currently college professors. Numerous others have taken their valuable humanities training into venues ranging from museums and nonprofit organizations to publishing houses and government positions. At any given time, about 800 MMUF fellows are enrolled in PhD programs, while the fellowship supports approximately 500 undergraduate students each year.
For more information about the national program, please visit the national website: http://www.mmuf.org/