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The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a $5 million grant renewal from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its Humanities Without Walls (HWW) initiative at the Humanities Research Institute (HRI).

Now a 16-member consortium of universities, HWW fosters collaborative research and explores the contributions of humanities in the workplace. The initiative is based at HRI (formerly the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"In the following Q&A, Antoinette Burton, a professor of history and of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and principal investigator of Humanities Without Walls, talks about the program’s origins, how the arts inspire social change, and why the Midwest is a microcosm of complex global issues."

The Humanities Without Walls consortium is pleased to announce the 2019 Pre-Doctoral Workshop Fellows.

As in 2017, this year’s call for applications was national one. Consequently this summer, students from 30 universities from across the US will join HWW in Chicago to learn how they can leverage their humanities skills and expertise inside and outside of the academy. To learn more about these summer career diversity workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities, please visit the HWW website.

The Humanities Without Walls consortium is pleased to announce the 2018 pre-doctoral workshop fellows. These thirty pre-doctoral students will participate in a three-week intensive, residential career diversity workshop this summer that instructs students in the various ways they can leverage their pre-existing and developing skill sets towards the pursuit of careers in the public humanities and the private sector. 

See the full list of 2018 pre-doctoral workshop fellows. 

From  The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record: Humanities Education in a Changing Climate for Knowledge Production Research Challenge Project. 

The Humanities Without Walls Consortium, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, fosters interdisciplinary, collaborative research, teaching, and scholarship in the humanities, sponsoring new areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation.   On Thursday, December 14, the Consortium announced the results of its latest research challenge initiative, “The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate.”  It awarded one of these grants—a multi-year investment of $138,360—to a team of humanists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  The award will support their multi-year research project, titled “The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record.” 

Read the article.

From the Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity: Comparative Approaches between Empiricism and Theory Research Challenge Project. 

The Humanities Without Walls consortium, which is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, awarded approximately $136,000 over the course of three years (2018-2020) through the Franke Institute for the Humanities (the consortium's partner institution at the University of Chicago) to the project “Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity: Comparative Approaches between Empiricism and Theory” —a collaborative endeavour from researchers at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and Purdue University. The project will investigate in a comparative perspective the social and cultural perceptions of, and experiences with, climate change in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages (third to first millennium BCE), through a multidisciplinary approach that convenes archaeologists, bioarchaeologists and text specialists focusing on three key geographic areas: Egypt and Nubia; the Eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia; and Mesopotamia.

Read the article.

The Humanities Without Walls consortium is pleased to announce the 2018 Research Challenge Grant recipients. Research Challenge grants fund cross-institutional teams of faculty and graduate students wishing to collaboratively pursue research topics related the subject of the research challenge. This year’s research challenge subject is “the work of the humanities in a changing climate.”

See the 2018 Research Challenge Grant Recipients.