Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities
The Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities (SIAH) offers an opportunity for undergraduates to engage in scholarly research while earning full-time academic credit. Students participate in a seminar led by an interdisciplinary teaching team, develop original research ideas related to an interdisciplinary theme, create a scholarly research paper or project, and formally present their work at a culminating symposium.
SIAH Mission
The institute was created by the Office of Undergraduate Research in collaboration with the Simpson Center for the Humanities to provide an intensive research opportunity for arts and humanities students that… – Increases the number of undergraduates doing research in the arts and humanities – Engages arts and humanities faculty in research with undergraduates – Establishes a community of undergraduate arts and humanities scholars – Creates a forum for arts and humanities undergraduates to present their scholarly work
Explore SIAH Across the Years
Each year, the Simpson Center for the Humanities selects an interdisciplinary theme that students and faculty explore together throughout the Summer Institute.
Seattle’s World Cup: Storytelling Through Community Mapping (2026)
Scholars explored the theoretical approaches of critical sport studies to engage in hands-on research and storytelling driven by the fundamental question of how people make meaning – personal, cultural, political – through large-scale events like the World Cup.
Earthworld: Life in a Turbulent Planet (2025)
We don’t live on Earth. We live in it, caught in the whirl of energy, story, matter, and meaning through which a planet becomes a home. But whose home? And how? Through the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, scholars investigated the interconnectedness of Earthly beings, elements, and narratives through which humans and other organisms fashion their worlds.
More-than-human Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of Life (2024)
What becomes possible when we decenter the human in the arts and humanities? Scholars explored frameworks from Indigenous epistemologies, critical animal studies, and multispecies ethnography, to explore the human and non-human dimensions of racial formations, settler colonialism, extractive capitalism, and other forms of violence.
A Black Sense: Time, Art, and Being (2023)
In which ways is reality and existence knowable? How does a sense of what exists move between individual and collective experience, and how do our senses shape what we can know, imagine, and do? How does the frame of Black studies – and a Black sense – as a particular intellectual and political project further animate these questions? Using “sense” as a throughline, scholars explored Black studies across freedom and liberation movements, visuality, music, and performance.
Faculty on the Summer Institute
The following is an excerpt from the closing remarks for the 2005 UW Summer Symposium in the Arts and Humanities
(Words by Phillip Thurtle, Professor in Comparative History of Ideas, University of Washington).
“I’m proud to work at a university that values undergraduate research in the arts and humanities. At most universities, when research opportunities arise for students they are typically in the sciences. Because of this, many of us don’t know what undergraduate research in the humanities looks like. This is a shame because research in the arts and humanities has different goals, different outcomes, places different demands on students, and offers different types of opportunities for those who undertake and witness it. As our society becomes increasingly oriented to the awesome power of the sciences it becomes more important, not less, to encourage research in the humanities amongst our students. So what does research in the arts and humanities offer?
This question is at once easy to answer and hard to convey the full importance of. For me, original research changes lives. The best research touches us, even draws us into a new ways of inhabiting our world, and makes the world and us larger. In the theme of this year’s summer institute, original research can take a world that has become commonplace and make it strangely new again. It does this by supplying novel explanatory frameworks. It does this by pointing to new and special occurrences that we might not have noticed. And it can do this by revealing new patterns in how the world itself is organized. Once it does this, however, an amazing thing occurs. The research opens up new concepts, territories, and spaces for explorations. If I can steal a theme from Comparative History of Ideas student Jennifer Stuller’s presentation, if magic is creating something from nothing, then what you have witnessed today is a little bit of magic.
The magic of research in the arts and humanities focuses the big issues of life and make them perceivable, even personal. In doing so, it transforms those who are willing and able to be touched by it.”
The Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Washington is sponsored by: