NUI Galway wishes to announce a donation of €340,550 ($459,000) it has received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The donation takes the form of a research enhancement grant to the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies designed specifically to assist researchers on three of the Institutes' current projects to internationalise their efforts. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant will provide support over a four-year period (2008-2012) to three strands of the research agenda 'Texts, Contexts, Cultures at the Moore Institute' already being funded by the Higher Education Authority under its Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions, Cycle 4 (PRTLI4). These strands are: The Life and Legacy of Columbanus directed by Conor Newman and Dr Mark Stansbury; Transmission and Cultural Exchange directed by Daniel Carey and Professor Jane Conroy; and Globalisation, Empire and Culture, directed by Dr Lionel Pilkington. The enhancement grant to these three interconnected research strands, with their associated graduate training, will enable the scholars and students engaged on these projects to bring a series of international scholars to the Moore Institute to provide specialist seminars and master classes; to support researchers and research students while they engage in short study visits to major research libraries and institutes abroad; and to arrange major international conferences relating to the subject of their research. Professor Nicholas Canny, Academic Director of the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, said: "The donation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will enable the Institute to further engage an international community of scholars in its research and graduate training mission which has always been transnational, multi-disciplinary and inter-institutional. It also brings credit to all who have worked in this vibrant research community over the past eight years". Since its inception in 2000, the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies has enabled humanities researchers across a range of disciplines to situate their work in a global context, bringing best practice in international scholarship to the Irish research community. The Moore Institute also caters for the mentoring of early stage researchers and for the transmission to them of transferable skills that promise both to develop their capacity for employment in the public sphere and to develop Ireland s knowledge economy. The Institute is called after the Moore family of Moore Hall in County Mayo whose members, in successive generations, sponsored such change in the west of Ireland over the course of four centuries. -Ends-