Johns Hopkins University has announced grants totaling $2.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create an interdisciplinary music program, expand arts programming at the university, and support half a dozen postdoctoral fellows in the humanities.

The funding includes a $1.2 million grant that will enable "bridge" professors — faculty jointly appointed by the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Peabody Institute — to create a new undergraduate degree program in music that capitalizes on the institute's resources in performance, music theory, and musicology and Krieger's assets in the historical, cultural, and scientific study of music. The grant also will be used to create an Arts Innovation Fund to support visiting artists-in-residence, new courses, student research, and artistic collaborations among the film, drama, writing seminars, and visual arts programs.

"We are so grateful to the Mellon Foundation for this generous grant," said Krieger School dean Katherine S. Newman. "I'm eager to see a music major in place. The creation of this new undergraduate degree program is contingent on the Krieger School building a faculty that is sufficient to the task of partnering with colleagues at Peabody to develop a distinctive, robust curriculum. The Mellon grant allows us to do just that."

In addition, the university received a grant of $500,000 to establish an assistant director position in the Krieger School's Museums and Society program and fund new initiatives that build on existing relationships between the university and museums in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The foundation also awarded the university a grant of $800,000 in support of the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, which over four years will recruit six postdoctoral fellows working to address the conceptual, philosophical, aesthetic, and practical aspects of artistic endeavor in relation to underlying religious cultures.