Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics
Over the course of two generous grants from The Mellon Foundation spanning from 2015-2022, the Simpson Center for the Humanities has built programming and partnerships that have transformed doctoral education in the humanities at UW. The Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics program implemented the conviction that doctoral education, especially at a public university, must be guided by a capacious vision of its fundamental purpose: to contribute to the public good. In this digital showcase, we highlight the work of our faculty, who received fellowships to develop publicly engaged graduate courses, and doctoral students, who were awarded support to pursue independent projects in public scholarship in their fields.
Peruse below the featured Graduate Seminars and Sample Syllabi.
Pathways
Going Public: Reimagining the PhD is a podcast dedicated to exploring public scholarship and publicly-engaged teaching in the humanities. Season 1 consists of interviews with Mellon-supported public scholars after they have launched their projects or taught their public-facing seminars. Season 2 features "Audio from the Archive" of Katz Distinguished Lecturers.
Over the seven years of the program, we supported 24 faculty to develop graduate-level seminars that incorporate public-facing elements and 28 doctoral students to pursue public scholarship projects. To learn more about our fellows and the range of disciplinary representation...
The conviction animating this initiative was that doctoral education, especially at a public university, must be guided by a capacious vision of its fundamental purpose: to contribute to the public good. From 2015-2019, the program prepared UW doctoral students in...
Featured Graduate Seminars and Sample Syllabi
This graduate seminar is focused on public rhetoric and placemaking. Drawing on public and place-based rhetorical theory and methods, urban studies, environmental communication, and interdisciplinary community-based approaches, this course engages in questions of how “places” come to matter; how they...
“Feminist Publics” surveys contemporary public-facing work in feminist studies, broadly conceived, highlighting writing in multiple forms and modes including blogs, op-eds, monographs (including “auto-theory”), and essays. We attend especially to scholarship in the field that is explicitly interested in engaging...
This seminar approaches, and contributes to, the writing of histories of Middle Eastern immigrant communities in the Puget Sound region through histories of West Asian and North African migration to the Americas. A central aim of this course is to...
This Cultural Studies course explores public scholarship as both an outcome and a domain of inquiry. We will consider when public scholarship is an end in itself and/or when it is a means to some other goal. In considering public...
This course takes Nordic film institutes as general models of public humanities spaces and as focused case studies in the role that public cultural institutions and cinema play in shaping publics. This course brings the Nordic region into conversation with...
What is the body online? How is it raced, classed, and gendered? Where is it located? And who speaks for it? This seminar examines the raced and gendered stakes in the construction of online lives as disembodied, and provides an...
Colin Marshall’s course, “Respect, Rhetoric, and the Psychology of Persuasion,” examines how ethically permissible persuasion can be accomplished, with particular attention to (a) issues of moral respect, (b) the ethics of rhetoric, and (c) relevant work in social sciences. Unlike...
This seminar offers an introduction to ecocriticism, or the study of literature and the environment. Our organizing principle is ecocriticism as opposed to more open-ended terms like “environmental humanities” in part because doing so foregrounds the political and ethical practice...
This course aims to introduce graduate and professional students from a wide range of backgrounds to some common moral concepts and to provide a basic philosophical framework for thinking about related issues that arise within their own disciplines or fields...
Faculty in area studies and literature and language departments are increasingly asked to organize film series, and yet PhD programs rarely prepare graduate students for such endeavors. Film festivals in particular offer scholars a unique opportunity to connect with broader...
This transdisciplinary and multilingual seminar, which aims to create a community of graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences working across modern languages as well as students in other fields who see translation as crucial to their scholarship...
This seminar explores the possibilities and potentials of media publics, building upon the concept of the public sphere. Starting with a historical examination of forms of television alternative to the dominant commercial and national model, the seminar then grapples with...
Featured Projects
Project Description Bollywood and Bolsheviks: Indo-Soviet Collaboration in Literature and Film, 1954-1991, is an oral history and exhibition project that charts the dynamic literary and cinematic exchange between India and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Combining a range...
Project Description “Pioneer Square and the Making of Queer Seattle” is a public project that transforms a walking tour of the Pioneer Square neighborhood—originally created by The Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project (NWGLHMP)—into a digital project. The original...
Project Description The Poetry Vlog (TPV) is a YouTube teaching channel and podcast dedicated to building social justice coalitions through arts, higher education, and pop culture dialogue. Two primary questions undergird TPV : What do poets teach us about how...