Mellon Discovery Fellowships

The Mellon Discovery Fellowship program brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines at the early stages of their careers in the belief that it is important and valuable to encourage collaborative exchange from the very beginning of graduate study. Funded by the Townsend Center and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program supports seven entering graduate students in the humanities and related fields for their first three years of graduate work at UC Berkeley.

Discovery Fellows form an ongoing interdisciplinary discussion group that meets at least three times a semester. Each fellow receives a summer grant of $5,000 for each of three summers. In order to encourage exchange across departments and disciplines, fellows work as research assistants for two summers, once for faculty in their own department and once for faculty from a different discipline. The third summer stipend is an outright grant. The fellows are free to choose the order in which they define their summers. Funds for group meetings and for conference planning and execution are included in the program’s budget.

For information about the 2007-2008 Discovery Fellows, click here.

For more information about the program, contact Associate Director Teresa Stojkov.

To Nominate

The nomination period for 2008-2011 Fellowships will open shortly before the program deadline of February 1, 2008.

Each department in the humanities and social sciences is eligible to nominate one incoming student per year for a Discovery Fellowship. Nominations are evaluated on the basis of the student’s potential for graduate study and according to the selection committee’s assessment of the student’s openness to a range of people and perspectives.

Send the following to the Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall, MC 2340, Attn: Discovery Awards:

1) A letter from the Department Chair or Graduate Advisor making the case for the student’s membership in the group. This letter is a particularly important part of the application materials.

2) A copy of the candidate’s admission papers (transcript, statement of purpose, GRE scores, letters of recommendation, and the department’s letter of support to the Graduate Division).