Opportunities for Graduate Students 2009-2010 (pdf)

The Simpson Center for the Humanities, one of the pre-eminent humanities centers in the country, recognizes that today’s graduate students are tomorrow’s intellectual, professional, and civic leaders. Graduate students are vital to our thriving, interdisciplinary atmosphere. With opportunities for both intellectual and financial support, we invite you to participate in an intellectual community that includes University of Washington faculty, faculty and leaders from other institutions, graduate students from a range of disciplines, undergraduates, and the public.

We involve graduate students in every element of our four-fold mission: encouraging crossdisciplinary research and inquiry, pioneering innovative, crossdisciplinary courses, promoting public scholarship and university-community engagement, and developing humanistic initiatives at the leading edge of change.

We balance diverse, structured activities–lectures, conferences, workshops, and seminars—with informal opportunities for the lively discussions and exchanges that advance crossdisciplinary understanding, collaboration, and research. Our comprehensive suite of innovative, integrative opportunities for graduate students at every stage of their careers has earned us national recognition and grant-making support from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Digital Humanities

The Simpson Center has steadily and increasingly promoted faculty and graduate student projects in the digital humanities. Web-based projects have experimented with new ways of doing and sharing scholarship, while lecture series and conferences have reflected on the forms and effects of our emerging digital culture.

The Simpson Center is a leading member of the national Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) and will host the 2010 HASTAC conference. In the 2008-09 academic year, six UW graduate students represent us in the new HASTAC Scholars Program as leaders and innovators in participatory learning and digital research.

This year the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Simpson Center a major challenge grant which, successfully matched, will create a $2.5 million endowment for a Digital Humanities Commons. The centerpiece of the Digital Humanities Commons is an annual summer program of fellowships for faculty and dissertators, emphasizing collaborative projects with digital dimensions.

Funding for Crossdisciplinary Research Clusters

Research clusters provide graduate students with opportunities to 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 2008-2009 four interdisciplinary clusters were supported by the Simpson Center—(dis)Orienting Asian American Studies, Queer Worlds, the Race / Knowledge Project, and the Visual Praxis Collective.

Microseminars & Courses

Crossdisciplinary graduate courses ranging from one to five credits engage students from across departments on a variety of topics related to Simpson Center initiatives.

with Katz Distinguished Lecturers
The Simpson Center administers the Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecturers in the Humanities series, which brings to campus some of the most renowned names in scholarship. While in residence, Katz Lecturers teach graduate microseminars related to their research. Recent visitors and topics include Wendy Brown (on Marx, critique, and religion), Mike Davis (on global food systems and crises), and Derek Gregory (on imaginative geographies).

in the Digital Humanities
The Digital Humanities Commons supports three microseminars that engage topics and methods in digital research, innovation, and scholarship each year. Some are designed to introduce the work of the annual Digital Humanities Commons Visiting Scholar. In May 2009, Alan Liu, creator of the Voice of the Shuttle website for humanities research and author of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004), inaugurates this program.

in Public Culture / Engaged Scholarship (HUM 595)
These courses explore relations among cultural research, public practice, and diverse forms of community engagement. Many are crosslisted with Masters of Arts in Cultural Studies (MACS) courses in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (IAS) at UW Bothell. For more information, visit www.uwb.edu/IAS/macs.

Public Culture / Engaged Scholarship (HUM 595)

These courses explore relations among cultural research, public practice, and diverse forms of community engagement. They are also crosslisted with Masters of Arts in Cultural Studies (MACS) courses in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (IAS) at UW Bothell.

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. Scholars meet over the course of an academic year. Graduate dissertation fellows are selected through a competitive process and released from teaching responsibilities for two quarters to focus on their research.