Artstor President James Shulman Joins The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as Senior Fellow in Residence

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May 02, 2016, 10:32 ET

NEW YORK, May 2, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today announced that James Shulman will join the Foundation as a senior fellow in residence, starting on May 16, 2016.

Shulman will work with Earl Lewis and Mariët Westermann, president and vice president of the Foundation, respectively, on topics of strategic importance. Among his projects, Shulman will write about high-impact philanthropy, the future of liberal arts colleges, and how digital technologies can support institutional imperatives to be inclusive and effective.

Shulman has served as the founding president of Artstor, a non-profit organization that makes more than two million images in the arts, architecture, and the humanities available to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities, and schools around the world, democratizing access to the world's cultural heritage. Artstor recently joined ITHAKA, the non-profit organization initially funded by the Mellon Foundation and several other philanthropies, that serves as a home to JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S&R.

"The Mellon Foundation is very proud to have incubated entities like Artstor and JSTOR that now form part of the foundational infrastructure of humanities and social sciences research and teaching," said Danielle Allen, chair of the Foundation's Board of Trustees. "We are indebted to James Shulman for his visionary leadership of this important project from conception to full maturity."

"Prior to heading Artstor James was a valuable member of the Mellon community and we are delighted to draw on his considerable talents once again," said Earl Lewis, president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. "In conceptualizing, building, and leading Artstor, he has balanced entrepreneurship with a profound appreciation of the work of scholarship and pedagogy. For the last fifteen years he has been immersed in the operational realities of bringing meaningful change to higher education and the arts community."

Mariët Westermann, vice president, noted: "It will be wonderful to have James back at Mellon in his new role. As the founding president of Artstor and a polymathic connoisseur of the humanities, the arts, and higher education, he will play an invaluable role as we pursue new research initiatives and convenings in the sectors the Foundation strives to serve."

"Everything that I've worked on for more than 20 years," Shulman noted, "has been guided by the Mellon ethos and has been made possible by the Foundation. I'm delighted to have the chance to return and to support the Foundation's ambitious efforts to combine continuity with change."

ABOUT JAMES SHULMAN
Shulman worked with colleagues to create Artstor in 2001 at the Mellon Foundation, where he had worked since 1994, writing about educational policy issues and working in a number of research, administrative, and investment capacities. While at Mellon, he collaborated with William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press, 1998), and coauthored (with William Bowen) The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2001). Shulman received his BA and PhD from Yale in Renaissance Studies. For the 2016-2017 academic year, he will also serve as an affiliate at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

ABOUT THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION
Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. Additional information is available at mellon.org.

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SOURCE The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation