Wheaton receives major grant from Mellon Foundation to start national institute for English majors

A select group of 12 English majors from all over the nation will learn what it takes to do doctoral work in English through a four-week summer program at Wheaton, starting in June 2008. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the college a grant of more than $400,000 for the first three years of the Summer Institute in Literary and Cultural Studies (SILCS), which aims to increase diversity among college and university faculty members teaching English.

SILCS will bring together promising young English majors between their junior and senior years who have been recommended by sponsoring faculty members at their home institutions and will provide intensive classroom instruction, tutorials in writing and editing, lectures from distinguished visiting faculty and field trips to New England universities and research collections. Students will learn literary and cultural theory as well as the ins and outs of the graduate school application process. They will work on their own writing, preparing an essay that can serve as a writing sample when they apply to graduate programs.

"The new Summer Institute for Literary and Cultural Studies, directed by English professor Paula Krebs, is a logical outgrowth of the college's commitment to inclusive excellence at all levels," says President Ronald A. Crutcher. "The institute has already spawned another initiative, the Program for Humanities Development at Ohio State University, and we expect that the work of the institute will produce other programs around the country, in English and in other humanities disciplines. In fact, we hope that Wheaton will host other such institutes as the success of SILCS becomes evident."

The institute will match up each student with a mentor from a different college or university, and that mentor will support the student throughout the graduate school application process as well as through the doctoral program. Graduates of SILCS will reunite each year at the annual conferences of the Modern Language Association and the College Language Association.

The Mellon Foundation grant will enable students to attend SILCS at no cost to themselves, and each student will be awarded a $2500 stipend.

A consortium of graduate programs in English has joined together to support the goals of the institute. Consortium members include The Ohio State University, Cornell University, Texas A&M, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Western Washington University, Penn State University, Harvard University, Yale University, Brandeis University, Boston College, Brown University and the University of Nevada Reno.

The institute grew out of the work of the Association of Departments of English (a division of the Modern Language Association) Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African Americans in the Profession and is guided by a steering committee made up of faculty members and administrators from a variety of institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), major research universities, master's degree-granting universities and liberal arts colleges.

For more information on the SILCS program, contact the SILCS director, Wheaton College Professor of English Paula Krebs, at pkrebs@wheatoncollege.edu or the SILCS Program Assistant, Lindsay Davignon, at silcs@wheatoncollege.edu or (508) 286-3745.