The Office of the Provost will be collaborating with various Emory schools and colleges to strengthen humanities across campus on a $2.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University announced yesterday.

According to Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs Earl Lewis, the grant will emphasize three core areas: humanities as it relates to neuroscience, genetics and digital scholarship.

“If you continue looking ahead from now, we’re in the age of the human genome. And our world is being transformed by digital information and systems,” Lewis said. “New advances in imaging and such will also expand our knowledge of how the brain works.”

He said the University must stay abreast of new thrust areas and represent those new areas.

Lewis, who serves as principal investigator, said the grant will also help fuel the hiring of the “next generation” of faculty in the humanities, including the new dean of Emory College. He said the new faculty will be charged with introducing into the curriculum new methodologies that are consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of humanistic inquiry.

“The interdisciplinary nature of our approach is very important and reflects the fact that intellectual areas as we look to the future will not always have the same boundaries that we understand now,” he said.

Though the economic recession had slowed University hiring in the past year, this grant can help propel renewed momentum in faculty hiring, Lewis said.

Lewis said the grant will also assist the Laney Graduate School and Emory Libraries in the mounting of a new certification program in digital humanities.

According to yesterday’s University press release, graduate students will also be included as Student Fellows in the new program, joining the new faculty in guiding how humanities departments advocate humanistic inquiry across the University.

After the grant sets up a framework throughout its five-year lifetime, Lewis said, the responsibility to continue the program will be absorbed by the schools and colleges.

Lewis said the provost’s office will work with the head of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and other schools involved in humanities, including Emory College, the Candler School of Theology and Oxford College, to implement the grant.

He said he believes the Mellon Foundation invested this grant in Emory because it shared the University’s long-term vision for the humanities. Emory received the grant at the end of December.

The University also received a number of other grants from the Mellon Foundation in December. One grant, totaling $53,000, will support Emory Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) initiative, which focuses on the use of new technologies for research. Another two grants were given to the Michael C. Carlos Museum and to Professor Emeritus William Beik for his studies of King Louis XIV.

— Contact Tiffany Han