Workshops for Graduate Students

The workshopping experience is integral to excellent scholarship. At the center, we focus on creating spaces where graduate student work is the primary focus, rather than at the periphery, and where graduate students can convene across disciplines and gain insights from one another, about the production of academic writing, the institutional strategizing required to manage a dissertation to completion and the array of methods for connecting to wider publics.

Check this page for a continuously updated list of the humanities center’s periodic workshop and other special offerings, both standalone and tied to the center’s events, for graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Below are workshops and opportunities for the 2025–26 academic year.

Limited Event

2025-26 Academic Year

Humanities Career Spotlight: Panel on High School and Intermediate Teaching

POSTPONED

Join us for a 90-minute conversation exploring the pathways from doctoral studies to careers in intermediate and secondary education. Our panel features three WashU PhD alumni educators who will share how they prepared for roles in these settings — whether during or after completing their doctoral degrees — and offer insights into their current work. Click the link above for details and registration.

Humanities Career Spotlight: Dr. Kenly Brown, Spencer Foundation

1 pm, Thursday, October 23, 2025, Zoom

Hear from Dr. Kenly Brown about her experience as a program officer for a private foundation — an important role in the broader world of the humanities — and learn more about how her humanities degree and her time at WashU helped prepare her for this exciting career.

Dr. Brown is the first guest in this year’s RDE-funded series, Humanities Career Spotlight. Intended as informational opportunities to for graduate students to think broadly about career possibilities for humanists, each Humanities Career Spotlight visitor will hail from a different part of the broader humanities ecosystem. Students, faculty, staff, community members and all are welcome. Click the link above for details and registration.

Demystifying the Academic Cover Letter

12 pm, Wednesday, September 24, 2025, Zoom

This workshop is for graduate students currently applying for academic positions or planning to do so in the future. Those attending will discuss the cover letter with sociologist Victoria Reyes, author of Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope. Dr. Reyes will invite us to think about the institutional norms that shape the cover letter as a genre of writing and give insights on how to translate your scholarly identity into effective cover letter language. 

Past workshops

Ongoing

Scholarly Writing Retreat
The Scholarly Writing Retreat offers WashU humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty, postdocs and graduate students the opportunity to jump-start their summer writing in a motivated, supportive and collaborative atmosphere.

More opportunities for WashU graduate students

There are many more ways for graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to become involved with the Center for the Humanities. Click the button below to return to the Graduate webpage.

MORE INFO