The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities has been awarded a $150,000 planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore new models for graduate education in the interdisciplinary humanities and arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

PI Antoinette Burton, the director of IPRH, will work with Professors Siobhan Somerville (Gender and Women’s Studies and English, LAS) and Gabriel Solis (Music, FAA) to develop Interseminars, a uniquely Illinois experiment to create a sustainable model for collaborative interdisciplinary work. Interseminars builds on past efforts in the Graduate College, including the INTERSECT program, which featured graduate seminars around themes like “Global Cultures of Law, “Global Indigenous Studies” and “Seeing Systems.” Intersect was based on the model of the National Science Foundation’s I-GERT (Integrative Graduate and Research Training) fellowship program.

Interseminars will integrate with existing humanities graduate programs and will encourage faculty and students to think collectively about new methodological approaches to thematic questions that require both individual expertise and shared intellectual effort.

Burton, Somerville, and Solis will organize a working group this academic year to research national models, making site visits to other institutions with innovative graduate programs and talking to fellow faculty, students, department heads and other campus leaders as they build a full-scale project proposal.

“We are thrilled to have been given resources to generate a campus-wide conversation about the best ways to sustain and grow doctoral degrees in the humanities and arts at Illinois,” said Burton. “Faculty and students are already working to re-imagine ways of educating and training graduate students in various ways, and this generous opportunity from the Mellon Foundation will help to catalyze those efforts.”

“Our campus already offers some of the most creative interdisciplinary graduate training in the arts and humanities, but it often goes unsung because of its emergent nature,” said Somerville.  “The Mellon planning grant will offer us an opportunity to sustain and build these exciting models, as well as to support new areas of interdisciplinary research that we haven’t even imagined yet.”

For questions please contact Antoinette Burton (aburton@illinois.edu).