The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has invited the University of Wisconsin-Madison to submit proposals for one or two Sawyer Seminars. The Sawyer Seminars program provides support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The program aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry. Each seminar normally meets for one year and provides support for one postdoctoral fellow and for the dissertation research of two graduate students. The maximum grant award for each seminar is $150,000.

The principle criteria for the awards are: 1) the scholarly importance of the subject to be examined; 2) the central questions to be addressed; 3) the cases to be compared and the rationale for the comparisons selected; 4) the thematic “threads” that will run through the seminar; 5) the institution’s resources and suitability for the proposed seminar; and 6) the procedures used in selecting graduate and postdoctoral fellows.

Mellon will select approximately ten Sawyer seminars by June 2009.

For more information, see this memo from UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell.