The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars program was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on historical and contemporary topics of scholarly significance. The seminars, named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, bring together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields—mainly, but not exclusively, in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences—for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. This program aims to engage productive scholars in multi-disciplinary and comparative inquiry that would in ordinary university circumstances be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centers, departments, or programs. 

The maximum grant award for each Sawyer seminar is $300,000. Mellon invites proposals that meaningfully engage faculty, other academic leaders, and visitors from a variety of fields in the study of academic freedom and democracy in the American university. The Foundation seeks to support seminars that demonstrate through humanistic methods the ways in which a higher education system featuring a multiplicity of perspectives, thoughts, and voices is essential to a functional democracy.
This is a limited submission opportunity, which means that the funder has limited the number of applications that can go forward from the University. The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies has established a process for identifying the one proposal that will go forward from the University of Iowa. The internal application process has two stages:

1. Interested UI faculty members should submit a letter of interest by 5:00 p.m. on September 16, 2024, to the Obermann Center's Director of Operations, Erin Hackathorn. Please include the following:

• The names and titles of 2–3 proposed principal seminar organizers, preferably from different disciplines; at least one principal seminar organizer must be tenured.
• A one-page abstract of the proposed project.
• A list of potential participants.
• A preliminary budget.

Selected groups will be notified on September 20, 2024 and invited to submit full proposals in stage two. 

Full information can be found here.