The Center for the Humanities co-hosted a summer 2025 retreat with Sam Fox’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice that brought together scholars from Princeton, UCLA, University of Arizona, Vanderbilt and WashU to advance the growing field of urban humanities. The retreat is part of a broader initiative to build the cross-institutional Urban Humanities Network (UHN) — and to further cement WashU’s leadership in this dynamic, interdisciplinary area.

Situated at the intersection of architecture, urban studies and the humanities, urban humanities analyzes the cultural, social and historical contexts of cities while also exploring how these contexts shape urban spaces and experiences. Through its Mellon-funded initiative, The Divided City (2014–24), a partnership between the Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School, WashU has been a vital contributor to the field’s development. In October 2024, Mellon granted WashU an additional $500,000 for The Engaged City, an urban cultural mapping initiative that builds on that work.

The UHN collaboration — which has also included Harvard and UC-Berkeley — has already found success. In 2023, it launched the Urban Humanities (Un)conference, which resulted in a forthcoming publication, “Urban Humanities 2: An (Un)Volume on Place, Pedagogy, and Practice.” The edited collection features contributions from more than 40 scholars, including several from WashU.

At their July meeting, supported by a Spark grant from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, UHN faculty and researchers gathered to plan for a second conference (hosted at WashU in October 2025), to outline the new publication and to map out a long-term funding strategy to support their new consortium.

WashU faculty and staff participating in this growing network and upcoming conference span departments and schools, including Matthew Bernstine (Sam Fox School), Noah Cohen (American Culture Studies), Joanna Dee Das (Performing Arts), John Early (Art), Bomin Kim (Sam Fox), Stephanie Kirk (Center for the Humanities, RLL), Bruce Lindsey (Sam Fox), Tila Neguse (CRE2), Laura Perry (Center for the Humanities), Kimberly Soriano (Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies) and Jonathan Stitelman (Sam Fox), among others.