Opportunities for Graduate Students 2007-2008 (pdf)

Graduate students are vital to the Simpson Center's thriving interdisciplinary atmosphere. Several programs and initiatives are designed to assist graduate students in their research and professional development. Students from a range of departments within the humanities and social sciences are eligible for support.

Courses and Microseminars
Simpson Center Crossdisciplinary Graduate Seminars are open to graduate students across disciplines and departments and allow both faculty and students to enrich their work through multi-disciplinary exchange. The Simpson Center also offers weeklong microseminars for graduate students led by visiting scholars.

Among the courses for 2007-2008 are:

Funding for Crossdisciplinary Research Clusters
Research clusters provide graduate students with opportunities to incubate and develop individual and collaborative projects in dialogue with students, faculty, and visiting scholars. Graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals to support crossdisciplinary conferences, colloquia, and collaborative research projects. In 2007-2008 five interdisciplinary clusters will be supported by the Simpson Center—Critical Animal Studies, Urban Studies in South Asia, Students Writing in Public, Queer Worlds, and Modernist Studies (now in its third year).

Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students
Each September the Simpson Center admits 20 graduate students as fellows in the Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students. Addressed to students pursuing careers within and outside higher education, the Institute encourages participants to integrate public scholarship into their research and teaching by introducing them to different models for university-community collaboration and partnership. Now in its fifth year, the Institute provides the setting in which students can begin to imagine and design research and community engagement projects in the company of others with like interests. Through site-based work, students learn how to identify resources, collaborate effectively, and reflect collectively, developing important institutional knowledge as well as professional skills in the process.

Graduate Student Research and Teaching Assistantships
Several of the Simpson Center’s projects offer graduate students opportunities to become integrally involved in humanities initiatives at the leading edge of change. The Danz Courses in the Humanities for undergraduates offer teaching assistant opportunities to nine graduate students each year. Additionally many faculty projects funded by the Simpson Center provide research assistantships on a quarterly and annual basis.

Society of Scholars Research Fellowships
The Society of Scholars is an intellectual community in which UW faculty and dissertators across generations, ranks, and departments contribute to and learn from one another’s work. Throughout the academic year the group meets biweekly over lunch to discuss their research. Typically three graduate students are selected as dissertation fellows each year through a competitive process and are offered awards releasing them from teaching responsibilities for two quarters to focus on their research.

Summer Residency Dissertation Fellowship Awards
For the second year in a row, the Simpson Center awarded summer dissertation fellowships to six doctoral students in 2007. Fellows receive $4500 to support their work on their dissertations and office space in the Simpson Center for a two-month period.

Other Opportunities
National Endowment for the Humanities Text-encoding Workshop
The UW is one of 12 institutions chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to host this workshop on scholarly text encoding for humanities faculty and graduate students. The workshop will be held on June 16-17, 2008 and it will focus on the theoretical issues that connect text encoding technology to scholarly methods.

Mentorships in the Public Humanites: Teachers as Scholars
Teachers as Scholars is a professional development program that joins K-12 teachers with University faculty in a climate designed to enrich the teaching and learning of both groups. By participating in small seminars led by UW faculty in the humanities, K-12 teachers are reconnected to the world of scholarship. In turn, University faculty become more fully involved in the ongoing efforts to improve primary and secondary education. In 2007-2008 the Simpson Center is launching a new initiative to involve doctoral students in this important program. Doctoral students from various departments will be selected to sit in on the seminars to observe this dynamic program in public scholarship.

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Developing a Dissertation Prospectus
This year the Simpson Center is sponsoring a pilot workshop aimed at helping pre-dissertation graduate students develop research projects and proposals in interdisciplinary fields. Inspired by the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship program of the Social Science Research Council, the workshop will be organized around a particular interdisciplinary domain, and will aim to gather graduate students from across UW in the humanities and social sciences departments around common intellectual questions. The workshop will gather ten students for a series of intensive formative meetings in June 2008, and reconvene them at the end of the summer before classes resume. Graduate students at the dissertation proposal or pre-proposal development stage will be eligible to participate.