URL: https://www.mellon.org/article/higher-learning-open-call-for-concepts-2026
Objectives
The Mellon Foundation Higher Learning’s Open Call for Concepts supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import. Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students, and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. Applications must be demonstrably grounded in the humanities and led by humanities scholars. Experimental methodologies, interdisciplinary and community collaboration, and pathways to informing campus and/or wider policies and practices are welcome.
Funding its 2026 Open Call for Concepts, Mellon Foundation invites applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following two areas:
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.
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?
Funding Information
$250,000 – $500,000 for up to 4 years.
Eligibility
The Principal Investigator (PI), 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.
Internal Selection Process
BU may submit up to 3 concepts.
Interested applicants should submit the following materials via InfoReady Review by: 11/24/2025
- Evidence the candidate has registered via Mellon’s Fluxx grant portal for the grant opportunity – PDF of confirmation email OR JPG screenshot of the confirmation webpage
- 2-page (maximum) Concept Summary describing the research and/or curricular project being proposed for the chosen concept. References may be included on 1 additional page.
- Updated CV for the PI
As necessary, a faculty review committee will review internal applications and select the institutional nominee(s). The Office of Research and Foundation Relations will work with the selected applicants to obtain an endorsement letter from the Provost and submit their concept materials by 2/17/2026.
This call is open to all accredited, non-profit, four-year-degree-granting higher education institutions in the US that offer multiple degrees in the humanities and/or humanistic social sciences and enroll more than 1,000 full-time, degree-seeking undergraduates. The Foundation seeks to support institutions with a demonstrated record of excellence in the humanities.
Deadlines
Internal Materials Due: Monday, November 24, 2025 by 11:59 pm ET
Anticipated Notification Date: Thursday, December 18, 2025
Concept Materials Due: Tuesday, February 17, 2026 by 3:00 pm ET
Invitations for Full Proposals: Summer 2026