The University of Pennsylvania Wolf Humanities Center awards five (5) one-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships each academic year to junior scholars in the humanities who are no more than five years out of their doctorate. Preference will be given to candidates not yet in tenure track positions, whose proposals are interdisciplinary, who have not previously enjoyed use of the resources of the University of Pennsylvania, and who would particularly benefit from and contribute to Penn's intellectual life.
The programs of the Wolf Humanities Center are conceived through yearly topics that invite broad interdisciplinary collaboration. For the 2025–2026 academic year, the topic is TRUTH.
The Wolf Humanities Center is keen to support projects that contribute to the dismantling of all forms of racial, gender, and other discrimination as they exist within the humanities. We know that such efforts can take an infinite variety of forms, and we encourage you to include in the course of your application an explanation of how your scholarship contributes to this effort if it does.
Fellows are required to be in residence for the term of the fellowship. During their appointment, Fellows are required to teach one course rostered in one or more of the humanities departments or programs in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences (not the Wolf Humanities Center), and must also participate in the Center's weekly Mellon Research Seminar, presenting their research at one of those seminars. Fellows also collaborate on the planning of a symposium on the topic of Heritage, participate in professional development workshops, and are appointed a faculty mentor.
The PhD (and its international equivalent, such as the DPhil) is the only eligible terminal degree. Applicants must be humanists or those in such allied fields as anthropology or history of science. The fellowship is open to all scholars, national and international, who meet eligibility requirements.
Scholars who received or will receive their PhD (or DPhil) between May 2020 and September 2025 are eligible to apply.