In a move to boost funding for research in the humanities and creative arts, University of Oregon Provost Jayanth Banavar has doubled the number of summer faculty fellowships for those disciplines.

Beginning next summer, the provost will award 10 summer stipends of $5,000 to tenure-related faculty members. Five fellowships will be awarded in both the humanities and creative arts.

Previously, the total number of summer fellowships for both disciplines was five. In the past, faculty members from the humanities received many of the grants, and they were administered entirely by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Oregon Humanities Center.

That prompted Christoph Lindner, dean of the UO’s College of Design, and Sabrina Madison-Cannon, the new dean of the School of Music and Dance, to connect with leaders in the university’s humanities community. They met with College of Arts and Sciences senior divisional dean Karen Ford and Paul Peppis, an English professor and director of the Oregon Humanities Center, to come up with an initiative to increase the summer fellowships.

They wrote a joint letter this fall to Banavar with a proposal to split the fellowships into two areas. One would focus on the humanities and be administered by the College of Arts and Sciences. The other, the organizers agreed, would be administered by the School of Music and Dance and the College of Design.

“It has been the case that the amount of internal support for creative work has been limited,” Peppis said. “We needed the help of the creative people. We believe the creative arts are equally important in the research that happens on campus and we hope this will facilitate more collaboration between the creative arts and the humanities.”

Banavar accepted the proposal and agreed to put up funding that will come from the Gordon Wright-James M. Wallace Endowment Fund.

Applications for the 10 summer fellowships are due Friday, Nov. 16. Applicants are not eligible to apply for three consecutive years after receiving an award, so those who were awarded in academic years 2015-16, 2016-17 or 2017-18 cannot apply this year.