Undergraduate

Join our humanities community

Humanities coursework and research allows undergraduate students to immerse themselves with unfamiliar scenes, languages and perspectives. Learning to navigate these complex situations and ideas prepares students to make clearheaded decisions, serve as effective members of their communities and communicate with a variety of audiences. To promote these outcomes, the Center for the Humanities is committed to building community among undergraduates pursuing research in humanities fields, to demystifying the nature of humanities research for undergraduate students and to increasing the number of engagements between students and the diverse array of on-campus events and programs in the humanities.
 
Learn more about the humanities center’s opportunities for undergraduates below. Then, take the next step and learn more about making a career in the humanities: Humanities at WashU.

For Students

Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship 
The Kling Program empowers WashU juniors and seniors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to pursue a funded humanities research project of their own design over the course of their third and fourth years, to engage in interdisciplinary work and conversations about the role of the humanities in college and in public life, and to polish their findings in the form of a published article. Prospective students apply as sophomores.

Themed Fellowships 
Themed fellowships support undergraduate students in all Arts & Sciences majors in pursuing short-term, individual humanities research on a shared topic, while also creating community among cohort members. 

Undergraduate Research Symposium
Beginning in spring 2024, the Center for the Humanities is partnering with the Office of Undergraduate Research to convene a special session of the semester’s Undergraduate Research Symposium. The session assembles students to give 8-minute “deeper dive” talks on their humanistic writing and research, as relevent to the symposium’s theme. Selected students meet with humanities center staff prior to the symposium to workshop their presentations. 

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. Studiolab courses are open to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students.
 

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Announcements, News

The Engaged City initiative to launch

Funded by a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Office of the Provost, the Engaged City aims to highlight St. Louis’ cultural resources — and to reframe how the city sees, understands and talks about itself.

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Human Ties Features

A factory worker’s take on AI

Anxiety over new technology replacing jobs is nothing new, writes Graduate Student Fellow Ki Cora Chow. But, she reminds us, even cutting-edge machines have always needed human minders.

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