About the Program
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship is the centerpiece of the Mellon Foundation's initiatives to amplify perspectives and contributions that have been marginalized within the conventional scholarly record and that promote the realization of a more socially just world. MMUF operates on many campuses throughout the United States and South Africa.
Student applicants to MMUF will be evaluated on the basis of their prior coursework, their plans for a major, and their potential to bring historically marginalized or underrepresented perspectives to the academy.
Some research themes and rubrics that may satisfy this goal include, but are not limited to, the following: 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; social movements and mass mobilizations; the transatlantic slave trade; settler colonial societies; and literary accounts of agency, subjectivity, and community. While it is not required that student applicants work within the above or related rubrics, preference may be given to applicants who do.
The program is designed to encourage fellows to enter PhD programs that prepare students for professorial careers; it is not intended to support students who intend to go on to medical school, law school, or other professional schools.
Dartmouth began its MMUF program in 1989. Beginning in 2005, Dartmouth extended its commitment to the program by sponsoring additional students as associate fellows funded by the dean of faculty and provost. Altogether, more than 200 students have completed MMUF at Dartmouth, with nearly 70% pursuing graduate degrees of some kind. Nearly 30 alumni of the program have joined the professoriate.
For more information:
Email the MMUF program at Dartmouth with any questions.