Where to Start? A Public Humanities Primer for Graduate Students
This year's RDE workshop is an opportunity for graduate students to take part in a series of sessions about the public humanities. What are the public humanities, and how are they practiced within higher education? How can graduate students incorporate its methods into their scholarship? How can they prepare to collaborate and engage with broader publics, during and after their doctoral training? Students will have the opportunity to network more closely with invited guests and hear about both methods and projects in the public humanities, as well as how they can secure funding for projects from highly regarded foundations and organizations. See the workshop’s webpage for more details. Breakfast and lunch will be served.
Friday, February 21
The RDE workshop is for graduate students in the humanities and humanities social science fields. Students will have the opportunity to network more closely with invited guests and hear about both methods and projects in the public humanities, as well as how they can secure funding for projects from highly-regarded foundations and organizations. Sessions meet in McMillan Café. Please note an updated schedule below!
9:30 am – Breakfast and initial conversations
10:00 am – Desiree Barron-Callaci, Senior Program Officer, American Council of Learned Societies
Building professional skills through scholarly research that will serve multiple potential career paths and help to articulate a student’s approach to future research collaborators beyond academia. A humanities resume brainstorming session with insights from the ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship program.
11:15 pm – MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, Associate Professor of History and Public History, American University
Suggestions, scenarios and best practices for getting involved in public humanities work as a graduate student in university context. Topics covered will include collaboration, ethics, scaling and sustainability, and possibilities for connecting interdisciplinary public humanities and academic work.
12:30 pm – Lunch
1:30 pm – Janine Utell, Associate Director of Academic Program Services and Professional Development, Modern Language Association
Come play in a public humanities “sandbox”! After a framing introduction — Public Humanities 101 — participants will be invited to brainstorm project ideas, individually and in groups. Participants will leave the workshop with two or three possibilities that can be ideated, inspired by the rest of the day’s sessions, along with resources from the MLA and other entities that will help with implementing project goals.
[postponed to a later date] Kendra Sullivan, Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Kendra will share projects from CUNY and across NYC, especially with an eye toward ways to create and preserve institutional spaces for the evolution of community-led research. Her talk will also touch upon community-engaged publishing practices, which aim to circulate work concurrently throughout multiple sectors toward coordinated ends.