The Price Lab for Digital Humanities has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This is the second Mellon grant the Price Lab has received.

The Price Lab, based in Penn Arts & Sciences, is the center for the University’s initiatives in the digital humanities.

With the grant, the Lab will provide funds for project incubation, undergraduate and graduate summer fellowships, training in digital tools and methods, early-stage research, and an annual digital humanities seminar. The grant will also support educational programs, including the newly launched undergraduate minor and graduate certificate in digital humanities and a fellowship program for doctoral students.

Jim English, founding faculty director of the Price Lab and John Welsh Centennial Professor of English, said the new grant “will enable us to do some exciting and innovative things, including new ‘mid-doctoral’ fellowships for humanities grad students and pop-up labs for faculty just getting started in DH.” Stuart Varner, the Lab’s managing director, added that they will be supporting “larger-scale and more public-facing digital projects that engage with the wider Philadelphia community.”   

“The Price Lab exemplifies our commitment to exploring the human experience with all the tools of the liberal arts,” said Steven Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience. “In the four years since the Lab was founded, students and faculty have done exciting work on projects as diverse as archaeological digs in Turkey to data mining texts from Early Modern India. I’m eager to see what the renewed support from the Mellon Foundation makes possible.”

The Price Lab was established in 2015 (Almanac February 10, 2015) with support from Michael Price (W’79), overseer and Power of Penn Arts & Sciences campaign chair, and Vikki Price.