The grant will be matched by funds raised by the University.

"Our collaboration with the Mellon Foundation has been important to the improvements we have made in our humanities departments and in interdisciplinary programs linking the humanities and the social sciences," said Edward S. Macias, Ph.D., executive vice chancellor and dean of Arts & Sciences. "In particular, these seminars have been enormously productive for graduate study at our University, and I am very pleased that they will become a permanent part of our program."

This grant follows three others from the Mellon foundation that funded dissertation seminars beginning in summer 1996. Steven N. Zwicker, Ph.D., the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and professor of English in Arts & Sciences, directed all three seminars, which included dissertation students in English, history, romance languages, comparative literature, philosophy and art history.

In summer 2001, two seminars were offered. Gerald Izenberg, Ph.D., professor of history, directed a seminar that included dissertation students in English, art history and German. And Wayne Fields, Ph.D., Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English, also conducted a seminar; students from English, anthropology, political science, history, and archaeology participated.

A vital part of the program of graduate education, the dissertation seminars aim to draw, as broadly as possible, students from across the humanities and the social sciences. The goal is to introduce these students to theoretical and methodological problems that would help them to think in new ways about their own fields, and to encourage them to see how their research programs could be linked with the interests of their contemporaries working in similar areas or time periods.

The seminars also serve to bring students out of the academic and intellectual isolation that often accompanies dissertation writers in the humanities and social sciences. The hope is to start the process of transforming them from specialists in particular fields into members of an intellectual community.

In addition, the seminars prepare students to translate their advanced work into questions and concerns that will engage and excite the next generation of college students.

"The Mellon dissertation seminars have already had a beneficial effect on completion rates and subsequent employment of the participants," said Robert E. Thach, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. "As a result, this program has inspired a number of serious replicas here in unrelated disciplinary areas."

The Mellon grant will enable the University to reach beyond St. Louis to include students in humanities and social science programs at Midwestern schools such as Northwestern and Vanderbilt universities and the universities of Chicago, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.

Mixing dissertation students from University programs and from other institutions would both strengthen the cohort and diversify disciplinary and interdisciplinary exchange.

Two seminars are planned for summer 2002. Zwicker will lead "The Emergence of a Public Sphere in Early Modernity," and Robert Hegel, Ph.D., professor of Asian and Near Eastern languages & literatures in Arts & Sciences, will lead a seminar on "The Study of Elite and Popular Cultures in Early Modern East Asia."

Graduate students in the humanities and social sciences writing or preparing to write their dissertations are invited to apply. Participating students will each receive an $1,800 stipend. Seminars will meet twice weekly for six weeks beginning in mid-May.