Miriam Bartha

Miriam Bartha, Associate Director, guides the development, support, and assessment of collaborative research, teaching, and engagement projects for the Simpson Center. She has co-directed many of the Center’s public engagement and public scholarship programs, including the Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students (with Bruce Burgett, 2005-2008), as well as Teachers as Scholars and Wednesday University (in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures, 2004-2010). She also has been integrally involved in facilitating the Difficult Dialogues and American Music Partnership of Seattle grants. Miriam serves as a University of Washington, Seattle, campus representative for the national consortium, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, for which she is co-chairing the fall 2010 national conference in Seattle. An affiliate faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences program at the University of Washington, Bothell, she is particularly interested in expanding and diversifying professional development opportunities and pathways for publicly engaged scholars, an emphasis of UW’s new graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship.

Miriam joined the Simpson Center for the Humanities in 2004. She received her PhD in English from Rutgers University; her dissertation focused on acts of witnessing in American post-war literature and drama. She previously taught women’s studies, cultural studies, literature, and composition at Rutgers and San Francisco State universities; worked as an arts administrator for PEN, the international non-profit writers' advocacy organization; produced a lecture and performance series, Poetry and the Public Sphere; and oversaw the electronic archiving and digital relaunching of HOW(ever), a historic journal of feminist experimental writing.