Initiatives: Public Humanities

programs supported by the center for the humanities

Engaging with the public can take many forms for academics— including community-engaged projects, sharing research with public audiences and creating forums for public conversation about urgent topics. The Center for the Humanities’ approach to public humanities is to build mutually beneficial and lasting partnerships with public partners. This model recognizes that humanists have as much to gain from the relationships (for example, opportunities to build skills and to test how the humanities can contribute to the public good) as our partners do.

Below, we share a slice of the humanities center’s many initiatives since our founding in 2003. The center supports a range of projects in the public humanities, whether research and writing, long-term collaborations with community partners or public-facing events and programs. We seek to build projects that reflect the interest and needs of our broader humanities community, and we warmly welcome WashU faculty, staff and students as well as community members to reach out to us. If you are interested in learning more or getting involved, contact Laura Perry, assistant director for research and public engagement.

Announcements, News

The Engaged City initiative to launch

Announcements, News

Center for the Humanities awarded NEH grant for humanities graduate student internship program

Student opportunities

Supporting students doing public humanities work

Banned Books Undergraduate Research Fellowship

During these semester-long fellowships, students engage in a research project on a topic of their choosing — one that might trace the history of a single particular banned book, or embark on a project at wider scale about the historical and cultural contexts of book banning — and deliver a public presentation of their work.

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Divided City Graduate Summer Research Fellowship

This full-time summer fellowship, focused on urban segregation broadly conceived, fosters public engagement by funding original writing and public-making activities that connect WashU graduate students with communities off campus.

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Public Events

Gathered audience for the 2023 McLeod Lecture

James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education

The James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education honors the esteemed vice chancellor of students, who died in 2011. The lecture series addresses the role of the liberal arts in higher education, a subject especially meaningful to Dean McLeod. In 2024, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, gave the address “The Unbearable Burden of Black Studies and the Enduring Fight for American Democracy,”

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Faculty Book Celebration

Humanities faculty pour years of research and writing into books and creative works that they hope contribute to conversations and help people on campus and beyond to understand their areas of study. These achievements are honored annually with the Faculty Book Celebration, an event that highlights these works with a grand book display and presentations by new authors, giving attendees the chance to engage with speakers and peruse the latest in WashU’s humanistic scholarship.

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International Humanities Prize

The Washington University International Humanities Prize is awarded by the Center for the Humanities biennially to a person who has contributed significantly to the humanities through a body of work that has dramatically impacted how we understand the human condition. In 2022, the humanities center honored cartoonist-memoirist Alison Bechdel.

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“The Power of Buttons”

In April 2024, the Center for the Humanities participated as one of nine sites throughout the U.S. in the National Humanities Center’s first-ever “Being Human” festival. On April 18, the center, in partnership with local arts educator CJ Mitchell, hosted “The Power of Buttons,” a public workshop engaging the St. Louis community with a small but powerful public text: the pin-back button. At the event, which took place at the Center of Contemporary Arts (COCA), local authors, WashU humanities PhD students and area nonprofits each hosted tables that showcased different forms of advocacy and local movements. They encouraged participants to think about how these histories intersected with their own struggles for change in their communities.The roughly 50 multigenerational attendees were also invited to design, create and take home their own buttons.

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Reflecting on Reproductive Justice Symposium

The public symposium Reflecting on Reproductive Justice convened nationally recognized advocates for reproductive justice with members of local organizations that work to ensure reproductive justice and equitable reproductive health outcomes in Missouri. Members of the WashU and St. Louis communities participated in the wide-ranging conversation to listen, reflect and learn about how to advocate for reproductive justice in the current political climate. In the lead up to the symposium, all were invited to attend a free public screening of “Aftershock,” a documentary that lays bare the life-and-death stakes in the fight for reproductive justice, and a student-moderated conversation at a local independent movie theater.

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Sumner Studiolab & Internship

**Humanist mixologists:** The Sumner Studiolab interns helped St. Louis–based beverage company Cheerz capture the flavor (literally and metaphorically) of the Ville for its new Sumner Seltzer.

The Sumner Studiolab — a community hub and classroom space — brings together students from Sumner High School (the oldest high school established for African American students west of the Mississippi), WashU students and residents from the surrounding Ville neighborhood. Initially funded by Washington University’s Divided City initiative, itself supported by the Mellon Foundation, the project has been boosted by an additional three years of funding from the Office of the Provost through its Here and Next initiative.

The cohort of Sumner High School interns is led by Crystal Payne, a PhD student in English and Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies. Among their projects during the 2023–24 school year, the interns helped to create a real-world product: St. Louis–based Cheerz’ Sumner Seltzer. With the charge to celebrate the history of the high school and its neighborhood, the interns developed skills in historical research and local storytelling to help create the flavor, product name and topics to be depicted on the cans.

Additionally, two on-site studiolab courses welcome WashU students from both Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts: “Historic Preservation, Community and Memory,” which emphasizes Sumner High School and the Ville neighborhood, and “The Unruly City,” which focuses on local history and urban humanities.

The Divided City

The Divided City was an urban humanities initiative (2014–23) in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Humanities, and the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. Funded just months before unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson (a St. Louis suburb just a few miles north of our campus) in 2014, faculty in the humanities and in architecture and urban design set in motion a project that would focus on the ways in which segregation in its broadest sense has and continues to play out as a set of spatial practices in cities, neighborhoods, public spaces, landscapes, and buildings. Brown’s death brought an urgency to the initiative and a razor-sharp focus to the city of St. Louis.

With an additional round of funding from the Mellon Foundation in 2018, the Divided City supported efforts to bring humanities scholars into productive interdisciplinary dialogue with architects, urban designers, landscape architects, legal scholars, sociologists and community members around one of the most persistent and vexing issues in urban studies – segregation. The initiative sponsored faculty collaborative grants; curricular initiatives; community grants graduate student research fellows; lectures, workshops and seminars; events and other community programming.

The photos below offer a small sample of the decade-long focus on public humanities and urban segregation. The spirit of this project lives on in the humanities center’ Divided City Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, Sumner Studiolab and soon-to-launch initiative The Engaged City.

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Collage map from the Divided City project Charting the American Bottom — “Charting the American Bottom” explored the vast, and often fragmented, flood plains of the East St. Louis region.

The Healing Walls was an April 2020 collaborative mural project between St. Louis and Louisville Artivists, which emerged directly from the deaths of Mike Brown and Breonna Taylor.

In 2017, the Center for Humanities at Washington University, the Museum Studies Program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL) and the Missouri History Museum hosted the Memorializing Displacement Workshop. Highlighting innovative practices in South Africa and major cities in the United States, the event aimed to instigate conversations among activists, scholars, curators and other museum professionals about how to recover and preserve stories of displaced communities and involuntary urban relocations in St. Louis.

Photo of people attending a film screening — A grant supported the course “Tale of Two Cities: Documenting Our Divides,” taught by Denise Ward-Brown, associate professor of art, the first cross-listed class between the Sam Fox College of Art and the American Cultural Studies program in Arts & Sciences. Students created documentary videos that used street events, meetings and interviews to capture the immediacy of the current historical moment in the aftermath of Ferguson.

“Making and Breaking the Public” was a collaborative faculty grant, organized as a research working group. Working with including architects, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, literature and cultural studies scholars and designers, primary investigators William Acree (Romance Languages & Literatures) and Samuel Shearer (African and African American Studies) attend to the meanings of publics, specifically urban publics.

Photo of a child drawing pictures — A “Sewing Futures of Mobility” workshop asked participants to imagine the future of transit in St. Louis, hosted by Mobility For All, By All, a Divided City Faculty Collaborative Grant, with their community partner the Sewcial Impact Project.

Photo of a group of graduate students — The 2022 cohort of Divided City Graduate Research Fellows, a group of students from the humanities and the Sam Fox School working on research related to urban segregation, broadly defined.

Publications

The Center for the Humanities communicates regularly with our on- and off-campus readers via four publications.

Humanities Broadsheet: This free online events calendar that compiles humanities-related happenings — including book readings, film discussions, lectures and artist talks — on the Washington University campus and in the Greater St. Louis community, highlighting and rallying support for our vibrant humanities community.

Monthly newsletter: All readers are invited to keep up with all the news and events organized by the Center for the Humanities — and dive into some great feature stories from our blog, Human Ties.

A Year in Review: Every year, we look back on the center’s events, programming and activities, as well as some of our favorite stories in our annual report.

Human Ties blog: The humanities center’s blog, Human Ties, features original content by faculty, postdocs, graduate students and other campus experts that highlights humanities scholarship for general readers. This publication amplifies WashU research and creative work and creates a bridge between new academic knowledge and the public.

Humanities Broadsheet

A monthly calendar of humanities-related events, delivered right to your inbox

Monthly newsletter

A monthly roundup of reads and events in the humanities at WashU

A Year in Review

Annual report of the Center for the Humanities

Human Ties

Original writing by campus humanities scholars for general readers.

Community-Engaged Practice

The Center for the Humanities regularly hosts events that highlight successful practitioners in the public humanities as well as programming designed to provide the WashU humanities community with opportunities to learn from exemplary models of community-engaged practice across a range of contexts and approaches.