The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced grants totaling $16.1 million to 12 liberal arts colleges in support of social justice-oriented curricular development in the humanities.

Awarded through the Humanities for All Times initiative, the grants will support newly developed curricula that both instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate the relevance of those methods to students’ broader social justice pursuits. Each institution will receive a grant of up to $1.5 million over three years to advance projects designed to help students see and experience the applicability of the humanities in their real-world social justice objectives.

Recipients include Austin College (Sherman, Texas), which was awarded $1.344 million in support of new and redesigned courses and community-engaged undergraduate research and internship experiences; Fort Lewis College (Durango, Colorado), which will receive $1.5 million for its All Our Nations Language Revitalization Hub centering on Native concepts of animacy in language, empowering language learners and teachers, and teaching language revitalization program design; Knox College (Galesburg, Illinois), which was awarded $1.234 million in support of a Humanities Lab to promote curricular innovation focused on “abolition” as a legacy of the college and a lens to understand its future; Occidental College (Los Angeles), which will receive $1.5 million to introduce incoming and first-year students to the problem-solving power of the humanities in addressing current social justice issues; Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, New York), which was awarded $1.185 million in support of its Black Studies Program and Racial Justice Teaching Challenge, an effort to advance Africana studies and social justice through innovative course creation and teaching, undergraduate research, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

For a complete list of recipients, see the Mellon Foundation website.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Leo Patrizi)