2023 Reports

Bringing Disciplines Together In Graduate Education: The Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows Program, Incite @ Columbia University

McAllister, William

This is a report and essay to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that discusses the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows Program, which was housed at Incite @ Columbia University. The program was designed to bring together advanced doctoral students from across the humanities and social sciences to expose them to the concepts, methods and empirical work of disciplines other than their own. Unlike most interdisciplinary programs, this initiative did not shun disciplinary distinctions but built on them to foster cross-disciplinary exchange and collaboration. In these ways, the program implicitly critiqued the intellectual education and training common to doctoral programs.

Keywords: Interdisciplinary; Cross-disciplinary; Doctoral education; PhD training