The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given $937,000 to the University of North Carolina Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the press announced yesterday. The money will provide three-year support for “Publishing the Long Civil-Rights Movement,” a collaborative effort that will build on the university’s interest in interdisciplinary civil-rights scholarship.

“The partners propose to experiment with new ways of publishing scholarship and expand the understanding of the civil-rights movement, with a focus on broad chronological, demographic, geographic, and thematic conceptions,” the press said in a news release. “This will widen the window of civil rights to include contemporary issues such as school resegregation, environmental and economic justice, and the women’s and gay-rights movements.”

The Mellon foundation has been active lately in encouraging university presses to connect their publishing activities to the intellectual pursuits and priorities of their home institutions. In October, for instance, the foundation awarded $627,000 to the University of Minnesota Press for a collaboration with the university’s Institute for Advanced Study. Such intra-university partnerships were a key recommendation of “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” an influential report issued by the Ithaka Group last summer. —Jennifer Howard