Dickinson Awarded $1 Million Grant to Advance Health Humanities
Major Mellon Foundation funding secured to build new program
by Tony Moore
Dickinson has received a significant grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to add to its groundbreaking work in literary disability studies, and phase II, “Building a Health Humanities Program,” promises to be even bigger than phase I.
The new $1,014,000 four-year grant builds on an initial $350,000 three-year grant awarded in 2022 for the project “Beyond the New Normal: Disability, Literature and Reimagining Social Justice,” brought to life by Professor of English Claire Seiler and Professor of Russian Alyssa DeBlasio.
“We’re thrilled and honored to receive continued funding in support of this ambitious project,” says DeBlasio, noting that the prestigious award reaffirms the caliber of Dickinson’s humanities faculty and the innovative work happening in collaboration between the humanities and sciences on campus. “The promises of this grant reflect what is distinctly liberal arts about Dickinson: strong partnerships across departments; the intellectual curiosity of our faculty, staff and students; and the nimbleness of our curriculum.”
Goals Going Forward
The original award supported collaborative faculty research and scholarship, curriculum development (including team-taught courses), pedagogical innovation, student-faculty research opportunities, network-building for humanistic disability studies and public-facing initiatives such as bringing scholars, writers and artists to campus. It focused on examining representations of disability and normality across diverse national literatures, integrating humanities perspectives on equity, stigma, access, discrimination and social justice amid what the professors described as an "urgent moment" for reimagining these issues.
With four goals in mind, the new $1,014,000 grant—which puts Dickinson at the forefront of health humanities undergraduate education—will allow the “Building a Health Humanities Program” project to expand and deepen previous efforts, sustaining momentum in literary and humanities-based approaches to disability studies while affirming the value of literary inquiry across disciplines and programs at Dickinson:
- Goal 1: Create a lasting institutional commitment at Dickinson to humanistic and community-engaged health humanities education, serving students pursuing health-related careers and those interested in humanistic approaches to health, disability and normality.
- Goal 2: Develop a robust, interdisciplinary undergraduate health humanities curriculum culminating in a formal minor (under the Health Studies umbrella), with disability and normality as central categories.
- Goal 3: Center the categories of disability and normality, along with community-engaged learning practices, as foundational elements of undergraduate health humanities education.
- Goal 4: Share insights, strategies and models with other undergraduate-serving institutions to help them build sustainable health humanities programs that engage faculty, students and community partners effectively.
More Than a Miracle
Seiler says securing major funding for humanities teaching, research, scholarship and communication right now feels like a “miracle.” But she knows it’s more than that.
“It’s not a miracle—this ‘win’ was made possible by our colleagues’ and students’ incredible embrace of ‘Beyond the New Normal,’ ” she says, adding that the Mellon Foundation recognized how effectively the first grant deepened faculty research and brought humanities faculty into new scholarly and public spaces. It also brought students into rigorous humanities study with a sense of shared public and career-preparatory purpose and created shared inquiry into disability, normality, the body, and health across disciplines and times. “We’re thrilled to have this vote of confidence from Mellon, which has supported our vision from the very start.”
Humanities at the Core
According to Renée Cramer P'28, dean and provost of the college, the funding will provide opportunities for faculty development and course reassignments, student engagement and internships and invitations to campus from leaders in the field of health humanities. All of this extends Dickinson's mission in exciting new ways—both focused on academics and career outcomes.
She also notes that the award is a testament to the important work DeBlasio and Seiler are bringing to the Dickinson community—and the importance of the liberal arts.
“I'm particularly pleased," she says, "that Mellon understands the health humanities at Dickinson as a way to bridge our students to their professional lives by articulating the importance of health professionals who come to their work through the liberal arts, through interdisciplinary achievement, through storytelling, through compassion and through curiosity about lived experience.”
TAKE THE NEXT STEPS
Published March 3, 2026