A Mellon Research Initiative is an intense and focused exploration of a particular interdisciplinary topic of great importance to UC Davis, the region, and the world. Each initiative receives generous funding to support three years of programming, a two-year Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor, and graduate recruitment and research.
In 2018-2019, two Mellon Research Initiatives will run concurrently: Racial Capitalism and Feminist & Arts Science Shop. In 2010, the UC Davis Humanities Institute received the first of two awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support interdisciplinary research in emerging areas across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. To date, the DHI has selected eight interdisciplinary Mellon Research Initiatives, four in the initial 2010 Mellon award and four under the 2014 renewal. Each Mellon Research Initiative receives a generous multi-year funding package that supports a two-year postdoctoral fellow, three years of event programming, and recruitment and research awards for graduate students. Find out more about the MRIs, both present and past, by following the links below.
Racial Capitalism
This initiative brings UC Davis faculty and graduate students together with outside scholars and activists to advance a research agenda that focuses on racial capitalism. The historical relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial debates in U.S. historiography. Sometimes explicitly, often only implicitly acknowledged, it shapes fundamental questions about inequality, value, life, bondage, and freedom, among others, across the disciplines of race and ethnic studies, history, literary studies, law, economics, sociology and anthropology. Over the course of the next three years we will be staging dialogues across current work and chart new directions for the study of racial capitalism.
Feminist Arts & Science (HATCH)
Our three-year Mellon Research Initiative will begin the process of creating a Feminist Arts & Science Shop at UCD. Our initiative draws on the European model of science shops that provide space for communities to participate in the creation of scientific and technological research agendas. We build upon this work by including the arts and specifically orienting our research agendas towards social justice ends. The UCD Feminist Arts & Science Shop will encourage the development of new science-making and artistic and humanistic modes of inquiry by providing a designated platform to co-create new ways of thinking about democracy and knowledge making in a community-engaged way.
Past Groups
Early Modern Studies
Environments & Societies
Social Justice Initiative
Digital Cultures
Comparative Border Studies
Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds