The Mellon Foundation's Higher Learning 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. 

The Mellon Foundation invites institutions of higher education to submit applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following topics: 

a) 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.

b) 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?

Higher Learning Open Call for Concepts Registration Deadline: December 1, 2025, 3:00 pm ET

Full Proposal Deadline: February 17, 2026, 3:00 pm ET

Link to FOA Here: Mellon Foundation 2026 Higher Learning Program Open Call for Concepts

Link to Application Guidelines: 2026 CFC Full Application Guidelines.pdf

Eligibility: The 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. The PI may also be the institution’s provost/chief academic officer.     

Institutional Limit: Three (3) applications per institution.

Application Information:  Interested faculty must submit:

• A concept note: Approximately 1,000 words; The note should describe the PI's ideas for a potential project, including specific activities it might involve. The note should clearly state the project’s goals, its potential impact, and the fitness of the institution and/or network for the proposed work.
• A proposed grant amount and a brief budget description for the project: The maximum budget allowed for this call is $500,000 over a grant term of up to four years. The description field should provide a list of the types of expenses the grant would fund –
  e.g., stipends, course releases, fellowships, on-campus or community programming, workshops, etc. 
• A short (1-2 page) CV for the Principal Investigator (PI)
  
  Applications not adhering to this requirement will be returned without review.