Humanities Without Walls News

Register for Humanities Without Walls: Alumni Panel 2020

elukehar@illinois.edu (Erin Ciciora) — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 14:45:00 CDT

Join us for a kickoff of Humanities Without Walls’ (HWW) 2020-21 career diversity programming! In this virtual roundtable, hear from three HWW fellowship alumni about their experiences post-fellowship and the ways in which the Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop informed their career exploration and development. You’ll also learn how to apply for the 2021 workshop, which will be virtual in nature.

Humanities Without Walls Awarded Mellon Grant Renewal

elukehar@illinois.edu (Erin Ciciora) — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 09:00:00 CDT

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.

Self-Knowledge as a Tool for Humanities PhDs to Combat Career Bias and Achieve Post-Doctoral Career Fulfillment

tolaporter@wustl.edu (Tola Porter) — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 13:30:00 CDT

Career Diversity is Not Plan B: Thoughts from a PhD Candidate on the Nonfaculty Job Market

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 09:00:00 CDT

Scholars in the Midwest Partner to Solve Today’s Challenges

mierek@illinois.edu — Tue, 07 May 2019 11:00:00 CDT

"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."

Announcing the 2019 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Workshop Fellows

hww-directorops@illinois.edu (Jason Mierek) — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 15:45:00 CST

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.

Announcing the 2018 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Workshop Fellows

delahan2@illinois.edu (Kelly Delahanty) — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 14:00:00 CST

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.

HWW Collaborative Project Studies Climate Change in Antiquity

delahan2@illinois.edu (Kelly Delahanty) — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 12:15:00 CST

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.

Humanists Win Major Grant to Explore the Future of the Historical Record

delahan2@illinois.edu — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 12:15:00 CST

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.

Announcing the 2018 Humanities Without Walls Research Challenge Grant Recipients

delahan2@illinois.edu (Kelly Delahanty) — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 13:30:00 CST

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.

Research Showcase: Hmong Memory at the Crossroads

delahan2@illinois.edu (Kelly Lynn Delahanty) — Thu, 11 May 2017 10:15:00 CDT

How does looking at history from the perspective of those who were written out of it change the way we understand the past? That’s one of the questions Safoi Babana-Hampton set out to answer about French colonial history and the American Vietnam War in Southeast Asia when she received a collaborative research grant from the Humanities Without Walls consortium, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to create Hmong Memory at the Crossroads. Produced, co-written, and co-directed by Safoi Babana-Hampton, Hmong Memory at the Crossroads is a documentary film that examines the experiences of Hmong refugees in the U.S. Midwest and France. The Hmong people are an ethnic minority from Southeast Asia and China, thousands of whom were recruited by the French and U.S. governments to fight as their allies in the Indochina and Vietnam Wars; hundreds of thousands of the Hmong fled their homelands after the war to seek asylum as refugees. The film follows Liachoua Lee, a Hmong-American from Rochester Hills, Michigan, as he revisits his past as a former refugee and son of Hmong veterans of the French Indochina War (1946–1954), and of the American Secret War in Laos (1961–1975).

Awards for "Hmong Memory at the Crossroads"

delahan2@illinois.edu (Kelly Delahanty) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 11:00:00 CDT

After its nomination for Best Feature Film at the Indie Fest USA International Film Festival in October 2015, and its well-received March 2016 premiere at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration, at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, France, Hmong Memory at the Crossroads, led by Professor Safoi Babana-Hampton as Senior Project PI, was featured in the Official Selections of the Universe Multicultural Film Festival (UMFF), Los Angeles, CA, in March 2017, where it won the Best Documentary Feature Award (photos attached from the event), and at the Mediterranean Film Festival Cannes (MFFC), France, in November 2016, where it won the Best Score Award for the original beautiful score composed by MSU Music Faculty Dr. Marjan Helms. The film was also selected to be screened at the Université des Antilles, in Fort-de-France, Martinique, as part of the annual convention of the Conseil International D’études Francophones, in June 2017.

The sequel documentary, Growing up Hmong at the Crossroads. will premiere at Indiana University, where it will be featured as part of the program of the annual meeting of 20th/21st Centuries French and Francophone Studies Colloquium. The film is scheduled to premiere in France (Paris) on May 31, in collaboration with French partners at the Collège d'études mondiales (Institute for Global Studies), whose home is the national research foundation "Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme".

Announcing the Humanities Without Walls 2017 fellows

delahan2@illinois.edu (Kelly Lynn Delahanty) — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 11:30:00 CST

Humanities Without Walls is pleased to announce the 2017 Pre-Doctoral Workshop Fellows. This year’s call for fellows was national one, opposed to previous calls which were limited to students enrolled at consortium institutions.

This summer, student from thirty universities from across the US will join HWW in Chicago to learn how they might use their humanities training outside of the academy. To learn more about these workshops, please check out the our information page about the alternative academic career summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities.

Birchbark Canoes and Wild Rice by Marcus Cederstorm

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:45:00 CDT

Please enjoy this video about Ojibwe birchbark canoes, created by Marcus Cederstrom, one of our 2015 Alt Ac Pre-doctoral fellows.

Birchbark Canoes and Wild Rice from Marcus Cederstrom on Vimeo.

2017 Alternative Academic Career Summer Workshop Call for Applications now open

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:00:00 CDT

The Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Consortium is pleased to announce the 2017 Alternative Academic Career Summer Workshops for Pre-Doctoral Students in the Humanities call for applications is now available.

These workshops encourage humanities doctoral students to think of themselves as agents of the public humanities and showcase opportunities beyond the walls of the academy in an uncertain academic job climate. In summer 2017, HWW will sponsor our first national summer workshop for graduate students interested in learning about careers outside of the academy and/or the tenure track system.

We invite applications for fellowships from pre-doctoral students to participate in a three-week intensive, residential summer workshop for individuals who are working towards but have not yet received a PhD in a humanities discipline, and who plan to continue their degree programs while also considering careers outside the academy and/or the tenure-track university system.

Applications due: September 30th, 2016, Central Time

Learn more about how the 2017 "Alt Ac" Pre-Doctoral Workshops.

Humanities Without Walls grant renewed for $4.2 million

delahan2@illinois.edu — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 15:30:00 CST

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $4.2 million grant to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to support the work of the Humanities Without Walls consortium. The goal of the consortium is to leverage the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses and create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. The grant, which builds on a two-year grant awarded in December 2013, will fund four years of scholarly collaboration through a consortium of fifteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond.

The new Mellon grant, led by IPRH Director and Principal Investigator Antoinette Burton, will support the consortium’s two signature initiatives: summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities and cross-institutional, collaborative awards for “grand research challenges.” The renewal comes with exciting changes to these initiatives. The theme of the next Grand Research Challenge initiative will be “The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate.” Interpreted narrowly, this theme calls for collaborative work on climate change, arguably the most pressing grand challenge of our time. Read more broadly, the potent metaphor of climate change offers humanists the opportunity to think about the meaning of all manner of “changing climates” — economic, religious, racial, digital, local or global, to name just a few.

The pre-doctoral workshops will continue to be organized by the Chicago Humanities Festival. They will alternate annually between offering places to pre-doctoral candidates from the consortium universities and accepting fellows from PhD programs outside of the consortium.

Full calls for applications and proposals for both these initiatives will be available by the end of April, 2016.

The Humanities Without Walls consortium includes Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University; and the Universities of Chicago, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Notre Dame and Wisconsin-Madison. The Chicago Humanities Festival and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are also serving as key intellectual and infrastructural partners for the project.

Announcing the Humanities Without Walls 2016 fellows and Global Midwest grants

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:00:00 CST

Humanities Without Walls is a grand experiment in collaboration at scale. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HWW has 15 partner institutions centered in the midwest. Participants are engaged in the process of testing big hypotheses through multi-sited research projects that aim to bring humanist expertise to bear on issues of great consequence in the contemporary moment. HWW is pleased to announce both our 2016 Pre-Doctoral Workshop Fellows and the recipients of the second round of Global Midwest grants. You can learn more about these initiatives and the Humanities Without Walls Consortium at the Humanities Without Walls website.

Videos from the 2015 Alt Ac Pre-Doctoral Workshop

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 08:45:00 CST

Please enjoy these videos from the 2015 Alt Ac Pre-Doctoral Summer Workshop, created by Anne von Petersdorff-Campen from Michigan State University.

Hmong Memory at the Crossroads: Trailer (English Subtitles)

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:00:00 CST

Please enjoy the trailer for Hmong Memory at the Crossroads, one of the round one Global Midwest projects.

"Wiigwaasi-Jiimaan: These Canoes Carry Culture" by Marcus Cederstrom, HWW fellow

iprh@illinois.edu — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 10:00:00 CST

Please enjoy this video about Ojibwe birchbark canoes, created by Marcus Cederstrom, one of our Alt Ac Pre-doctoral fellows.

Wiigwaasi-Jiimaan: These Canoes Carry Culture from Marcus Cederstrom on Vimeo.

An Alt-Ac Summer Workshop That Works (A guest post on The Professor Is In) - Rebecah Pusifer

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 13:00:00 CDT

Graduate study, as TPII readers know well, is wildly out of step with the current state of the academic job market. Tenure-track positions are scarce and endangered, yet graduate programs have been slow to acknowledge this reality. They continue to peddle the fairy tale of the TT job, often while failing to provide practical advice about the market.

In July, I attended a funded, three-week workshop that offered a different model of graduate education. Jointly administered by the Chicago Humanities Festival and Humanities Without Walls, a consortium of fifteen humanities centers funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alternative Academic Summer Workshop invited thirty pre-doctoral students in the humanities to explore how academic training can be leveraged for jobs outside the academy.

Read the rest of Rebecah Pulsifer's post at The Professor Is In.

The Alternative Academic Pre-Doctoral Workshop Fellows Blog

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:45:00 CDT

During the 2015 alternative academic career pre-doctoral summer workshops we asked fellows to blog about their experiences. Please take the time to read their thoughts and reflections at the Alt Ac Workshop Fellows blog.

Chicago's Alternative Academic Career Summer Workshop - Jonathan Elmer

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 12:45:00 CDT

“Your dissertation has become a trade press blockbuster. It’s on a display table in the bookstore. What else is on that table?”

It is day 1 of a three-week workshop in Chicago, and Andrew Benedict-Nelson, from Greenhouse Consulting, is leading twenty-nine advanced PhD students in the humanities through some exercises designed to move the mental furniture around. Starting from their own work—he had boned up on the students’ dissertation projects—Benedict-Nelson (a former PhD student in the history of medicine) is getting everyone to take unlikely moves from their starting point. What would it mean for my book to be popular? (A big jump forward.) Then, what would popular mean—what’s on the table?—if my book is popular? (Now a jump sideways.) The exercise is like a knight’s move in chess. Suddenly, the horizon has changed.

Read the rest of Johnathan Elmer's post at the MLA Commons.

$200,000 for Collaborative Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences from the ACLS

delahan2@illinois.edu — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 13:00:00 CDT

The American Council of Learned Societies is inviting applications for the eighth annual competition for the ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowships for collaborative research in the humanities and related social sciences.

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the aim of the program is to offer small teams of two or more scholars the opportunity to collaborate intensively on a single, substantive project. The fellowship supports projects that produce a tangible research product (such as a joint print or WQeb publication) for which two or more collaborators will take credit.

The fellowships are for a total period of up to twenty-four months, to be initiated between July 1, 2016 and September 1, 2018, and provide up to $60,000 in salary replacement for each collaborator as well as up to $20,000 in collaboration funds (which may be used for such purposes as travel, materials, or research assistance). The total grant amount per project will depend on the number of collaborators and the duration of the research leaves but will not exceed $200,000 for any one project.

To be eligible, a project must involve at least two scholars who are each seeking salary-replacement stipends for six to twelve continuous months of supported research leave to pursue full-time collaborative research. The project coordinator must have an appointment at a U.S.-based institution of higher education; other project members may be at institutions outside the U.S or be independent scholars. In addition, all project collaborators must hold a Ph.D. degree or its equivalent in publications and professional experience at the time of application.

For complete program guidelines and application instructions, visit the ACLS website: Complete RFP.

Deadline: September 23, 2015 (9:00 p.m. EST)

Chicago Humanities Festival to Co-host Humanities Without Walls Alternative Academic Career Workshop for PhD Students in the Humanities

iprh_coordinator@mx.uillinois.edu — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 09:45:00 CDT

CHICAGO, IL—July 8, 2015—The Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) and the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium will launch an ambitious three-week workshop for PhD students in the humanities, focused on professional opportunities in the public humanities. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the workshop will run from July 20 to Aug. 7 at the Gratz Center at Fourth Presbyterian Church (126 E Chestnut St). It will introduce 30 PhD students from 15 national universities to Chicago-based public humanities projects and industries, in fields such as journalism, tech, design, and museum curation.

“There is a perception that a PhD in the humanities is only of value if it leads directly to an academic position. That simply isn’t true,” said CHF Associate Artistic Director Alison Cuddy. “Training in the humanities puts you in a great position to be involved in issues of importance to your community and the broader public. Humanities Without Walls is designed to help students reimagine their post-doctoral life and consider the skills and networks to access a career in the public humanities.”

The workshop will feature Chicago leaders across the private, non-profit, and government sectors, including Michael Darling (James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art), Brian Fitzpatrick (Former Google exec and founder/CTO of Tock), Laurel Seely Voloder (Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, US State Department), and Angel Ysaguirre (Executive Director, Illinois Humanities Council).

The Chicago Humanities Festival is also partnering with organizations including the business incubator 1871, Art Institute of Chicago, The Field Museum, Leo Burnett, and IDEO. For a full schedule with a complete list of presenters, visit humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu.

The workshop will run full time Monday through Friday, beginning on July 20. In addition to presentations, networking events, and workshops facilitated by the Gratz Center at Fourth Presbyterian Church, the students will also take fieldtrips to partner organizations in the city.

The 2016 Humanities Without Walls consortium pre-doctoral summer workshop is currently open for application. The applicant must be a humanities graduate student working towards, but have not yet received, a PhD degree from one of the 15 consortium institutions. For more information, visit humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu.

About the Chicago Humanities Festival
For 25 years, the Chicago Humanities Festival has celebrated the questions that shape and define us as individuals, communities, and cultures. For the curious at heart, CHF’s vibrant year-round programming and robust Fall Festival offer the opportunity to engage with some of the world’s most brilliant minds. Collaborating with leading arts, cultural, and educational organizations, it presents scholars, artists and architects, thinkers, theologians, and policy makers that change how we see the world, where we’re from, and where we’re going. Under the leadership of Executive Director Phillip Bahar, Marilynn Thoma Artistic Director Jonathan Elmer, and Associate Artistic Director Alison Cuddy, CHF is one of Chicago’s most vital presenting organizations.

The Chicago Humanities Festival has grown from eight programs in one day at a single venue in 1990, to 160 programs year-round at more than 25 venues in and around Chicago. Over the past 25 years, CHF has put on more than 2,600 programs and performances, and presented more than 3,300 speakers and artists, including: 10 Nobel Prize winners, 70 Pulitzer Prize winners, 52 MacArthur Award recipients, 16 Tony Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, and seven Academy Award winners. Visit chicagohumanities.org for more information.