Third grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for 'Humanities Across Borders' (HaB)

27 October 2020

The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a third grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York to support the consolidation and institutionalisation of its flagship collaborative education programme ‘Humanities Across Borders’ (HaB). From building a trans-regional network of partners to testing out-of-classroom and community embedded experiential pedagogies in HaB 1.0, in this next phase, HaB and its 18 partners in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, will mobilise institutions into a new pattern of South-South-North collaboration in higher education.

The three institutional innovations envisioned for HaB 2.0 are:

A global consortium with its commitment to public humanist values in education.

  1. A foundational curricular platform in ‘Humanities across Borders’ co-created and co-taught across the consortium’s geographies.
  2. An interactive digital platform and pedagogical resource repository made widely accessible through partner libraries.

In this way, we hope to build a collaborative model of locally rooted, globally conscious, higher education that, until now, has been an aspirational ideal for many universities attempting to achieve educational justice goals. In the coming years, we will disseminate the program’s situated learning approach extensively, via the consortium’s website, publications, conferences, and other pedagogical events, and hope to encourage other institutions to join our endeavour.

I take this opportunity, on behalf of IIAS and its partners, to express our sincere gratitude to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its vision and support to HaB and its efforts in re-enchanting public humanist values among academe today.

Philippe Peycam

Director, IIAS Leiden, The Netherlands

October 2020