Application FAQ

There are many good reasons. You may want to explore how digital tools can enhance your primary program of research or teaching. You may want to collaborate with others, pushing disciplinary boundaries to create significant scholarly resources. You may want to mentor others through university programs that feature outreach to the community at large or create public facing, open-access online resources. You may want to attend offsite summer workshops at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Toronto (or any of DHSI’s associated workshops elsewhere). You may want to present work-in-progress or form new working relationships at, for example, the annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) International conference. You may want to improve your professional qualifications for the academic job market and/or for alternative jobs that frequently call for digital skills in addition to the background you’re acquiring in your academic specialty.

Any PhD student in good standing in English, History, Philosophy, or Visual and Cultural Studies, or ESM departments of Music Theory, Musicology, and Composition is eligible. Students may apply during any year of their tenure as PhD students (although we recommend students apply in their third year and beyond), and they may submit applications while they are working on any major milestone of their graduate careers (exam preparation, dissertation prospectus, dissertation writing). Different departments have different requirements for students in the various years of their studies; the Meliora D&I Mellon fellowship program is lexibleflexible enough to take these differences in account.

The writing sample should be whatever writing you think represents the quality of your best work. It can be on any topic at any length (although ideally something in the 15–30 page range).

You should ask a faculty member familiar with your work to write a confidential letter of support. (Ask the faculty member to send the letter directly to humanities@rochester.edu).

The fellowship lasts for two years, and includes additional support for attending workshops, conferences, etc., that are relevant to your Meliora D&I program work: $5000 per year for offsite training at workshops in the summer, for instance, and at least $2000 per year for additional research expenses. All fellows also participate in DMST 501, the Meliora D&I seminar, which meets weekly for a mix of guest lectures, reading and discussion, WIP presentations, and workshop training sessions. The seminar curriculum is collaboratively designed by the Program Director and fellows to meet the needs of current cohorts. Fellows are encouraged to pursue work on their own individual projects, but they also have the option to work on other collaborative digital media projects to explore the diversity of opportunities provided by collaborative and interdisciplinary digital media scholarship and pedagogy.

If you are interested in learning broadly about technology in the humanities, then you should apply to the Meliora D&I fellowship program. You will need to articulate in your application the potential relationship between your humanities research and expertise in technology that you would like to cultivate, and you should also indicate ways in which you think technology might inform your future thinking. You do not need to describe a single digital project, but you are encouraged to explain your rationale for exploring digital media research methodology and practice and ideas you might have for individual projects or areas of interest. Prior digital skills aren’t required.

No. It is a 1-credit discussion course co-directed by faculty and students. In this as in all other respects, the Meliora D&I program encourages an ethos of interdisciplinarity and collaboration among the fellows.

From the start, Meliora D&I program fellows (and their predecessors in the Mellon Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities) have participated in the development of new curricula and training programs. As opportunities for digital work at UR have increased, so have interdisciplinary and collaborative partnerships across (and beyond) the university. The River Campus Libraries have been essential to the Meliora program’s success. The Humanities Center in Rush Rhees Library provides a home for the fellows’ training and research, generously providing a dedicated space in HC Conference Room 211, event spaces, and administrative support. The Meliora program could not exist without the expertise of the Library’s Digital Scholarship staff. DS provides vital support for the fellows’ training and research through ongoing technical instruction, consultation, and collaboration that consistently supports fellows at all stages of their training, project design, and execution. Conversely, Mellon fellows have been involved in many DS projects.

More broadly, UR’s River Campus Libraries, including their impressive range of staff with skills directly relevant to the digital humanities and a strong desire to serve the academic community, have further benefited our projects. Meliora fellows have on multiple occasions used the VISTA Collaboratory, for instance, an advanced imaging facility in the Carlson Science & Engineering Library and the Studio X teaching and learning center (also located in Carlson). Altogether, these additions have contributed to a highly creative and supportive context for Meliora D&I fellows and their work, and vice versa. Indeed, the Meliora D&I program’s openness and extreme interdisciplinarity complement the Library’s collaborative orientation and its commitment to (and long history of) academic partnership and innovation.

Past fellows have worked with every member of the Library’s Digital Scholarship department. Fellows have also contributed to projects coordinated/sponsored by other Library colleagues, such as the highly respected Medieval English Texts project (Robbins Library, directed by Anna Siebach-Larsen, PhD).

Project-based courses are those in which students engage in hands-on work in addition to studying traditional humanities materials. Graduate students who opt to co-teach with faculty in these courses can learn the relevant technologies and assist undergraduates in developing their skills and applying them to the humanities materials. They can gain teaching experience while helping students understand how digital technology inflects humanities research and learning with new meaning.

A Faculty Humanities Lab is an ongoing faculty-led research project, generally one that is complex and that benefits from interdisciplinary collaboration. FHLs typically consist of a faculty Principal Investigator (sometimes two or more PIs); Meliora fellows or graduate students who opt to work with that faculty member; and, often, undergraduates for whom the fellow or graduate student serves as mentor. In this scenario, graduate students serve as both apprentices and mentors, learning as much as possible from the faculty PI(s) about the project, and then (a) doing his or her own work on the project and (b) mentoring undergraduates who work on the project.

Some Faculty Humanities Labs are occasionally associated with academic courses; others are not. (See list of projects below.)

Examples of ongoing FHL’s have included Morris Eaves’s William Blake Archive; Thomas Slaughter’s Seward Family Papers project; Michael Jarvis’s Virtual St. George’s [Bermuda]; Joel Burges’s Visualizing Televisual Time; Joanne Bernardi’s Reenvisioning Japan; Peter Christensen’s Architectural Biometrics; the Robbins Library’s Middle English Text Series; and Gregory Heyworth’s Lazarus and R-Chive projects, among others. Interest, activity, and resources in the digital humanities at UR have increased sharply since the Mellon DH program began in 2013-14. Over time, Mellon and Meliora D&I fellows at UR have developed a remarkable track record of participation and accomplishment in a highly diverse array of initiatives across the university and region, including those in the Warner School of Education and Human Development, the Eastman School of Music, and the Mellon-funded Central New York Humanities Corridor (where Mellon fellows helped to found the Global Digital Humanities working group).