The Society for the Humanities at Cornell has announced the recipients of the inaugural Brett de Bary Interdisciplinary Mellon Writing Group grants.

The Mellon Foundation has provided five years of support for interdisciplinary writing groups to permit humanities faculty and graduate students to make progress on their research while carrying out their regular teaching and advising duties.

The awards are named in honor of Brett de Bary, the outgoing director of the Society for the Humanities.

"Always sensitive to developing novel ways of supporting the research of our colleagues in the humanities, Brett de Bary presented the Mellon Foundation with an engaging granting platform that would promote fluid exchange between cross-disciplinary Cornell faculty and advanced graduate students on their ongoing research and writing projects," said Timothy Murray, the society's new director and Cornell professor of comparative literature and English.

The awards for 2008-09 will support the exchange of faculty and graduate student work in three research areas:

• Centering Africa: Subjectivity, Modernity and Global Change. Recipients: Judith Byfield, Africana Studies and Research Center; Johanna Crane, science and technology studies; Jeremy Foster, landscape architecture; Sandra Greene, history; Stacey Langwick, anthropology; Dan Magaziner, history; Dagwami Woubshet, English.
• Fluid Communities: Heterogeneous Social Groups of the Mediterranean Sea. Recipients: Kimberly Bowes, classics; Ziad Fahmy, Near Eastern studies; Kathryn Gleason, landscape architecture; Sturt Manning, archaeology and classics; Christopher Monroe, Near Eastern studies and Society for the Humanities Fellow; Eric Rebillard, classics; Barry Strauss, history and classics; Matthew Sears, classics.
• Human Rights and Cosmopolitanism. Recipients: Diane Rubenstein, government, American studies and Romance studies; Elizabeth Anker, English; Matthew Evangelista, government and peace studies; Grant Farred, English and Africana studies; Bernadette Meyler, law; Neil Saccamano, English and comparative literature; Cory Browning, Romance studies; Stephanie DeGooyer, English; Danielle Aberle Haque, English; Paloma Yannakakis, comparative literature.