Washington University – Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Washington University in St. Louis announces the eighteenth year of Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry, a postdoctoral fellowship program endowed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, designed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching across the humanities and social sciences. A select group of newly qualified Ph.D.s enrich their training through this program that offers highly developed expectations of trans-disciplinary research and teaching.

The fellowship in Interdisciplinary Inquiry was established to build on several long-standing commitments at Washington University: to the conjoint study of literature and history; to interdisciplinary, but period-specific inquiry; to intellectual history; and to the study of interaction of politics and cultural activity.  The participants in these interdisciplinary activities came to feel the importance of enabling young scholars to supplement their doctoral training in a traditional discipline with sustained engagement with the theory, methods, and canons of inquiry of another discipline or disciplines.  Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry seeks to address the cultural and institutional nature of interdisciplinarity itself and to create conditions in which interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities and social sciences can more easily flourish both within and outside the departmental traditions of a research university.