The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is very pleased to announce a recent grant award of $1 million from the Research Universities and Humanistic Scholarship Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant provides endowment support to augment pre-doctoral fellowships and for the School’s core academic program.
The American School is the most significant resource in Greece for students and scholars of the language, literature, art, history, archaeology, and philosophy of Greece and the Greek world from pre-Hellenic times to the present. With its extensive resources and teaching programs, the School is unique among American overseas research centers. Foremost among its academic programs is the full academic year program, open through a competitive examination to 15 to 20 Ph.D. candidates in classics, ancient history, classical archaeology, art history, and related fields. Regular Members receive comprehensive, rigorous training through systematic guided visits to the principal archaeological sites and museums of Greece and seminars taught by resident and visiting scholars. They can also participate in the training program at the School’s excavations in Corinth. The School also serves approximately 30 to 50 Student Associate Members each year, graduate students whose dissertations and research interests bring them to Greece.
Quoting from the application, “The ASCSA academic program is unique among international research centers, providing a rigorous curriculum-driven approach which capitalizes on the access to the material culture available in Greece. Today, this program attracts the best students from the top universities in the North America and has trained leading scholars at every major North American academic institution, as well as professionals who have gone on to distinguished careers in other fields. A grant from the Mellon Foundation will ensure that the core academic program will continue to serve future generation of classicists, historians, archaeologists, art historians, and those in other humanistic disciplines.”
“A major grant from the Mellon Foundation would also provide critical leverage to allow us to raise additional funding from both institutional and individual sources for fellowship endowment (minimum needed of $2 million), as well as to increase the endowment for the core academic program (minimum needed of $1 million). With the help of the Mellon Foundation the School hopes, over the course of the next three years, to secure the future of its outstanding academic program and the fellowships that allow graduate students to attend the American School.”
The American School is extremely grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for this very generous grant and looks forward to working with all constituents of the School to raise matching funds for fellowships and the academic program.