History
A Brief History and Overview of the Kelly-Douglas Fund
The Kelly-Douglas Fund was established in 1975 through generous donations of I. Austin Kelly III (1903-2003, S. B. 1926). Its founder and first director was the historian Richard M. Douglas (1922-2005), who came to MIT in 1962 to head its Humanities Department. Upon his retirement in 1991, Austin Kelly requested that the Kelly Fund be re-named the Kelly-Douglas Fund in honour of its first director.
The Fund was subsequently piloted for five years by the historian Arthur Kaledin, and then for ten years (1996-2006) by the music historian, Lowell Lindgren, under whose tenure the basic policies of the Fund as it operates today were put into place. Professor Lindgren was the motivating force behind the undergraduate travelling fellowships; these were first awarded in 2000, following the silver anniversary of the Kelly-Douglas Fund. The current director is Shankar Raman, Associate Professor in the Literature Section at MIT.
The Fund divides its resources over three main areas:
- Teaching and Research Support for teaching staff (primarily faculty and lecturers) and graduate students in HASS. The Fund helps teachers bring in guest lecturers, take students to see a performance, and so on. It assists graduate student research and development through partial support for travel to conferences, libraries, archives, or other repositories of information centrally related to the student's research.
- The I. Austin Kelly III Essay Prizes recognize excellence in humanistic scholarship by MIT undergraduates.
- Travelling Fellowships are awarded to MIT undergraduates who intend to pursue HASS-related or humanitarian projects during either IAP or the Summer.
