Graduate

At the center, we support the humanities graduate students of today as they find audiences for their work, both within and beyond academia, and plot careers both within and beyond the professoriate. We foster writing and collaborative communities crucial to the development of research that speaks across disciplines and draws on an array of methods. As a non-departmental unit supporting the humanities as a whole, we seek to connect graduate students with opportunities to do public-facing humanities work and to use their doctoral training in a variety of contexts.

For Students

Workshops for Graduate Students
Check this page for a continuously updated list of the humanities center’s periodic workshop offerings, both standalone and tied to the center’s events, for graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Various deadlines; check website.

Graduate Student Fellowship
WashU graduate students writing dissertations in humanities disciplines spend a semester in residence with the humanities center during which they participate in the center’s intensive, interdisciplinary intellectual environment. Current competition: Applications due April 12, 2024.

Divided City Graduate Summer Research Fellowship
With the support of the Here and Next initiative, a program of the Office of the Provost, this fellowship encourages interdisciplinary connections among graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, art, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture while funding two months of research on how segregation has and continues to play out as a set of spatial practices in cities, neighborhoods and public spaces. Current competition: Applications due April 12, 2024.

Reading and Writing Groups
The Center for the Humanities offers grants to tenured, tenure-track or teaching Washington University faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences and to Washington University humanities graduate students to support reading and writing groups on a particular subject or theme. The groups are self-organized by the participants, have an ongoing core membership and meet regularly throughout the academic year. Applications are due annually in February.

Studiolab Courses
The humanities studiolab draws inspiration from both the studio and laboratory as pedagogical spaces, organized around a theme or problem for a sustained period. In addition to work on the central topic, members of the studiolab community incorporate and develop capacities, beyond specific disciplinary skills, essential to success within and beyond academia: competency with digital and other media, collaboration, project management, communication with multiple audiences and oral presentation. 

Mentored Professional Experience (MPE)
The Center for the Humanities is a participating unit in Arts & Sciences’ Office of Graduate Studies Mentored Professional Experience (MPE) program. Working with their staff mentors, MPEs in the humanities center develop projects that engage with humanities impact reporting, project management, symposium and event planning, humanities program research and development, grant writing and/or community engagement. 

NEH Humanities@Work Internship Program
More to come on this new program!
Center for the Humanities awarded NEH grant for humanities graduate student internship program
‘Humanities at Work’: Center for the Humanities wins NEH grant to support graduate internships

For Humanities Units

Cluster Grants – Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities
Cluster Grants support faculty members in imagining how RDE funding could benefit a department or program as a whole. This approach can build momentum for necessary changes in areas like curriculum, dissertations, mentoring and diverse career outcomes. With multiple faculty collaborating around shared concerns, the ripple effects of Cluster Grants can be exponential.

My favorite thing about my Graduate Student Fellowship was the workshop experience. It was incredible to sit in the same room and learn from scholars who are further on in their careers. The workshops not only helped me improve specific arguments in my dissertation chapter but also helped me imagine out how I can situate the contribution of my scholarship within the humanities as a whole.

―Xuela ZhangProgram in Comparative Literature (International Writers Track), Fall 2023 Graduate Student Fellow