Established in 1988, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is committed to supporting a demographic transformation in higher education and to promoting the value of multivocality in the humanities and related disciplines. Its name honors Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the noted African-American educator, statesman, minister, and former president of Morehouse College.
Founded with an initial cohort of eight member institutions, the program has grown to include forty-seven member schools and three consortia, including the UNCF consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Whittier College is part of the MMUF West Coast Region which includes Caltech, Stanford, University of New Mexico, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCR, USC, and two consortia (five Cal State campuses and the Claremont Colleges).
Open to students of all races and ethnicities, the MMUF program is committed to multivocality -- amplifying perspectives and contributions that have been marginalized within the conventional scholarly record and that promote the realization of a more socially just world. Through a pipeline process that emphasizes mentoring, research support, programming, and student cohort building, Mellon partners with Whittier College to identify and support students of great promise and to help them become scholars and professionals of the highest distinction. The program seeks to increase the number of students who will pursue a Ph.D. and enter the professoriate in core humanities and social science fields. Fellows must demonstrate the potential to elevate the knowledge that informs more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience and lays the foundation for more just and equitable futures.
Up to five Whittier College students will be selected as Mellon Mays Fellows annually and will explore their interest in college teaching in disciplines of special interest to the Foundation. Under the two-year fellowship, selected students will receive financial support to engage in independent research through the academic and summer periods, attend and present their research at local and national conferences, one-on-one support from faculty mentors at Whittier, and will engage with other MMUF Fellows at Mellon-sponsored events.
Some research themes and rubrics that may satisfy MMUF’s commitment to multivocality include but are not limited to, the following: historical and contemporary treatments of race, racialization, and racial formation; intersectional experience and analysis; gender and sexuality; Indigenous history and culture; questions about diaspora; coloniality and decolonization; the carceral state; migration and immigration; urban inequalities; social movements and mass mobilizations; the transatlantic slave trade; settler colonial societies; and literary accounts of agency, subjectivity, and community. While it is not required that student applicants work within the above or related rubrics, preference may be given to applicants who do.
Spring Semester Cycle: The application is due on April 1, 2025. Faculty mentor letters of recommendation are due April 4, 2025. Fall Semester Cycle: TBD
Students may be nominated by Whittier College instructors or they may nominate themselves. Each nominated student will receive an email and letter encouraging them to apply.
Cohort 1 (2008-2009) Cohort 2 (2009-2010) Cohort 3 (2010-2011) Cohort 4 (2011-2012) Cohort 5 (2012-2013) Cohort 6 (2013-2014) Cohort 7 (2014-2015) Cohort 8 (2015-2016) Cohort 9 (2016-2017) Cohort 10 (2017-2018) Cohort 11 (2018-2019) Cohort 12 (2019-2020) Cohort 13 (2020-2021) Cohort 14 (2021-2022) Cohort 15 (2022-2023) Cohort 16 (2023-2024) Cohort 17 (2024-2025)
Associate Professor of English Mellon Mays Program Coordinator Hoover 213 562.907.4334 mchihara@whittier.edu
Associate Professor of Sociology Public Health Program Coordinator Platner 122 562.907.4307 jcollins@whittier.edu
MMUF Administrative Coordinator Science & Learning Center 314 562.907.5145 esanche1@whittier.edu
Benjamin Elijah Mays, was born in 1895 in South Carolina, and graduated from Bates College in Maine in 1920. He went to the University of Chicago for his master's degree and doctorate, and while he was working on those degrees, he was ordained into the Baptist ministry. He taught at Morehouse College and at South Carolina State College. From 1934 to 1940, he served as dean of the Howard University School of Religion and then moved on to the presidency of Morehouse College, a position he distinguished for the next quarter of a century. He also served his community well, becoming the first black president of the Atlanta school board.
He spoke early and often against segregation and for education. He received nearly thirty honorary doctorates and other honors and awards including election to the Schomburg Honor Roll of Race Relations, one of a dozen major leaders so honored. He had been a model for one of his Morehouse students, Martin Luther King, Jr., and he served the young minister as an unofficial senior advisor. He gave the eulogy at King's funeral. Among his books were the first sociological study of African-American religion, The Negro's Church, published in 1933; and The Negro's God, of 1938; Disturbed About Man, of 1969; and his autobiography Born to Rebel, of 1971. These books reveal a combination of sharp intellect with religious commitment and prophetic conviction.
The American National Biography website has a comprehensive biography on Dr. Mays.
