Davis fellows will be specialists in the study and teaching of the cultures of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation supports private higher education, hospices, health care, public television, and graduate theological education. The first recipient of the Major Cultures fellowship will be selected this semester from among the nearly 600 applicants in the Society's 23rd annual international fellowship competition. The Davis fellows will join seven other postdoctoral fellows in the humanities resident at the Heyman Center for the Humanities. With the awarding of the Arthur Vining Davis grant, the Society plans to build a comparable group of fellows who, in fulfillment of their undergraduate teaching assignment, will teach in Columbia College's Major Cultures program.
Students normally meet the requirement by taking one course from two of three categories.
An eight-member fellowship selection committee, composed of faculty members from the Society's governing board, will select the recipient of the Major Cultures fellowship. Since its founding in 1976 with endowment grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William R. Kenan Charitable Trust, the Society has supported more than 100 fellows who have taught more than 300 sections of general education courses in Columbia College, and have subsequently entered into impressive academic careers, several currently holding tenured positions at Columbia. Society fellows enhance the humanities inter component of Columbia College's general education program while developing sophisticated research skills and interdisciplinary thinking that transgresses limiting boundaries established by departmentalization and conventional field definitions.