Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students
June 9, September 12 - September 18, 2008

Application deadline: Friday, April 18, 2008
Call for applications

Program Overview

How can the best traditions of cultural research, public scholarship, and arts practice be used to generate creative and collaborative partnerships across diverse communities?

What should graduate education aimed at culturally transformative work entail and what is necessary to institutionalize these forms of practice?

The Institute on the Public Humanities offers an interdisciplinary cohort of 20 graduate students an intensive week-long exploration of these questions and the diverse cultural practices of community engagement.  Within the context of the Institute, “public humanities” indicates forms of inquiry that engage questions of arts and culture critically and creatively, theoretically and pragmatically, broadly and locally.  Doctoral students from any University of Washington program are encouraged to apply.

Addressed to students pursuing careers within and outside higher education, the Institute cultivates skills and knowledge that enable effective and generative culture work across academic and non-academic communities and institutions. In site- and project-based activities, Institute participants work with faculty, staff, and community leaders to develop capacities for cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration.  The workshop format provides opportunities to engage directly, concretely, and formatively with different models of university-community collaboration in a variety of local contexts.  Readings and discussions offer critical perspective on the structural challenges and possibilities attending community-based research, teaching, and engagement, as well as new maps and new language for navigating professional and institutional development in this field. 

The goal of the Institute is to hone students' capacity to imagine and enact collaborative culture work across multiple sites inside and outside the university, and to represent their own aspirations and abilities as publicly-engaged scholars.   It is designed as an intensive, participatory experience reconsidering, re-contextualizing, and reorienting current forms of institutional practice. For more on Institute learning objectives, readings, and program schedule, see the Institute archives at www.simpsoncenter.org/institute

Award
Institute participants receive a $500 stipend and are named Fellows of the 2008 Institute.

Schedule
Fellows accepted into the Institute will meet for a planning session on Wednesday, June 11 at 3:00 pm-6:00 pm. In September, the Institute will hold its opening session Friday afternoon, September 12, and meet daily September 15-18.

Application: Apply online by April 18, 2008
There are three steps in the application process. You must complete all three steps in order to be considered for the Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students.

1. Complete the brief Catalyst survey to indicate your interest in the Doctoral Institute. You may access the survey here:
   https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/uwch/49059

2. Upload a letter of interest and a recent curriculum vita using the Catalyst Collect It dropbox. Your cover letter, in no more than 750 words, should describe your research, teaching, and/or engagement interests as well as any relevant professional and/or personal experience that informs your interests. We are interested in how you imagine yourself entering into fields that bridge academic and non-academic concern and inquiries through arts and cultural forms of inquiry, including those that travel under the names "public/engaged scholarship;" "campus-community partnership;" "community-based/participatory action research;" "community-based or service learning." Lastly, we want to know what formative questions (practical, theoretical, ethical, political) you might be bringing to the Institute and what you aspire to gain through the Institute in terms of your own professional and personal development.

3. Submit your letter and vita using this Catalyst Collect It dropbox:
   https://catalysttools.washington.edu/collectit/dropbox/uwch/1715

4. Email request and instructions for a letter of support to your designated faculty member.

Faculty: Letters should speak to the student’s aptitude and aspirations for the kinds of participatory, collaborative, and publicly-engaged professional development offered by the Institute as well as relevant research and teaching interests. For program details, refer to the Institute Website at www.simpsoncenter.org/institute.

Letters of reference are due on April 18, 2008, and should be emailed directly by the faculty member to Renee DeLong at red2@u.washington.edu.

Assistance with using Catalyst Collect It tools is available on the Catalyst Website.

Notification
Applicants will be notified regarding acceptance by May 16, 2008. Those accepted as Fellows of the 2008 Institute will be asked to provide a brief biographical statement/ statement of purpose for electronic circulation prior to the June 11 planning meeting. This statement can be an edited version of the application cover letter.  

2008 Institute Co-Directors

Miriam Bartha is Assistant Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she helps develop and support collaborative research projects and the Simpson Center’s public programs. She received her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University.  She has worked previously as an instructor, an arts administrator at an international non-profit writers’ advocacy organization, as coordinator of the Poetry and the Public Sphere series, and as project manager for the electronic archiving of HOW(ever) a historic journal of feminist experimental writing, and its electronic reincarnation, HOW2. 

Bruce Burgett is Professor and Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, and graduate faculty in the English Department at the University of Washington Seattle. He co-directs the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective and is a key architect of the community-based Masters of Arts in Cultural Studies at UWB.  Author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic and co-editor (with Glenn Hendler) of Keywords of American Cultural Studies, he has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Queer Studies. He serves on the Editorial Boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History, and the Executive Board of the U.S. Cultural Studies Association.

Inquiries
Please address questions to Miriam Bartha at (206) 543-3920.  You may also write mbartha@u.washington.edu and copy burgett@u.washington.edu.

The 2008 Institute is sponsored by the Simpson Center of the Humanities, the Divisional Dean of Arts & Humanities, the Divisional Dean of Social Sciences, and The Graduate School Fund for Excellence at the University of Washington. The Institute is the first of its kind in the nation. It received recognition as a "best practice" in the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's publication, The Responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education (2005).