Mellon Foundation Call for Concepts 2026
Mellon Foundation Call for Concepts 2026 is sponsored by Mellon Foundation. Invites humanities-grounded ideas for research and/or curricular projects on 'Unruly Intelligences' or 'Normalization and Its Discontents'. University of Minnesota Duluth campus may submit up to three applications.
Official opportunity description and requirements excerpt:
2026 Higher Learning Program Open Call for Concepts | Mellon Foundation 2026 Higher Learning Program Open Call for Concepts Applicant Resources More from Higher Learning Grant Database Grantmaking area Higher Learning Photo: Camila Falquez for Mellon Foundation The Mellon Foundation invites institutions of higher education to submit applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following two areas: “My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.” - Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920) The emergence of generative AI has triggered a firestorm of techno-utopian promises and apocalyptic predictions alike. These reckonings often imply that AI is “intelligent” in the human sense, even though from the iconic use of this term in his 1950 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Alan Turing called this attitude “dangerous” and famously defined artificial intelligence only in terms of how well computers could imitate human thought. Are we now facing an existential abdication of human capacities to machines? Or the usual evolution of how we define intelligence in keeping with our shifting technologies? Meanwhile, the terms of human and more-than-human intelligences are also unstable, with greater or lesser value assigned to particular populations, species, and objects according to our historical, social, and ecological contexts. How might different forms of AI – generative, predictive, agentic, and others, including models that are currently still theoretical – complicate or exacerbate the inequalities that arise from these norms? With so much at stake, the humanities have an urgent role to play in shaping contemporary understanding of artificial and other intelligences – and in making practical, informed recommendations about how to regulate and/or adopt AI in our learning, work, and most intimate lives. Normalization and Its Discontents “Why be happy when you could be normal?” - Jeanette Winterson (2011) The concept of normalcy is paradoxical. It entails the statistically average that is at the same time a moral imperative, a completely ordinary state that is nonetheless much to be desired, a cultural ideal. Moreover, the normal often functions as the ideal even when it is not numerically average. Despite the seemingly universal character of these formulations, the normal entered Western consciousnesses only in the modern era with the nineteenth-century efflorescence of statistics, bringing with it its opposite: the deviant, exceptional, aberrant, not normal. How does the concept of normalcy govern notions of human life, and when doesn’t it? What are the structures and systems that keep it in place, in realms as
Application snapshot: target deadline February 17, 2026; published funding information $250,000–$500,000; eligibility guidance University of Minnesota Duluth faculty/researchers (limited submission)
Use the official notice and source links for final requirements, attachment checklists, allowable costs, and submission instructions before applying.
$250,000–$500,000Deadline: Feb 17, 2026
