Initiatives

Initiated in 2010, this three-year grant from the Japan Foundation builds on the Visiting Scholars in Japanese Literature Program coordinated by the UW’s Asian Languages & Literature department since 2004. The Simpson Center also supports the Japan Humanities Project, through funding, administrative, and logistical assistance.

Now Urbanism, a 2010-2012 John E. Sawyer Seminar in the Study of Comparative Cultures, sought to connect and critically assess the diverse territories of sustainability theory and practice evidenced in multidisciplinary urban scholarship, activism, and policy.

This five-week pilot program in 2011 joined UW faculty, staff, and graduate students in an intensive effort to foster sustainable digital scholarship and interoperable communities of digital practice on campus. In workshops and seminars, DRSI fellows engaged in reimagining the forms and functions of research, peer review, and scholarly communication in the humanities.

In January 2009, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Simpson Center a $625,000 Challenge Grant to support the digital humanities at the UW.  If matched 3 to 1 by private donations, the sum total of $2.5 million will endow the Digital Humanities Commons, a summer fellowship program for faculty and graduate students.

The mandate of the Center for Biological Futures, founded Spring 2011 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, is to foster better thinking about the present and future impacts of increases in biological knowledge and increases in worldwide use of that knowledge to manipulate and build living systems.