Angela Dillard has been involved in several different initiatives that can be grouped under the heading of public history, engaged scholarship and community-based education. Some of these are detailed below . . .
The Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis is a two-part program awarded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first project grant ($1.3 million) was awarded in 2013, and the second renewal grant ($1 million) was awarded in 2019. The Program explores contemporary issues on urbanism and egalitarianism, and is an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Angela Dillard has served as a co-PI on Part II of the grant. Building on the first grant, which engaged with the “egalitarian metropolis” in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Detroit, the renewed grant (2019-2022) is now focusing on the city of Detroit. After a half-century urban crisis that fundamentally undermined equality, and brutally conjoined patterns of residential segregation with racism, ethnic intolerance and discrimination, Detroit’s partial recovery has provoked a profound “urban conversation” over the aspiration voiced by Detroit’s previous Planning and Development Director, Maurice Cox, that “Detroit’s recovery will be the most inclusive of any American city.” The urban humanities can and must be part of this conversation.
Overall, the project seeks to transform The Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis into an “Urban Humanities Initiative” at the University of Michigan that is organized around a partnership of humanists, architects/urban designers/planners, and community leaders. The project’s commitment to research and teaching aims to not only model a future for these disciplines, but to also demonstrate how the urban humanities can be effective partners in the movement for more inclusive cities. As part of this project Dillard co-designed and co-taught a course on The Egalitarian Metropolis: Urban Studies, Urban Design & Social Justice in Detroit. The grant has also founded a variety of pr has also founded a variety of projects, including Detroit as a Carceral Space, which is part of the larger Carceral State Project at the U-M, and the Detroit River Story Lab (see below). The project is coming to a close as of December 2023/January 2024. It’s work as been preserved with the Egalitarian Metropolis Digital Archive, which I encourage you to visit and explore.
The Detroit River Story Lab started in fall 2020 with grant-funded partnerships and several multidisciplinary courses devoted to amplifying the international waterway’s long and deep store of sustaining narratives, past and present. As envisioned by David Porter, professor of English and comparative literature, the multiyear project spans both sides of the river and collaborates with organizations-including the Detroit Historical Society, Detroit River Project, Planet Detroit and the state Department of Natural Resources-on projects that reconnect communities with the river and its stories. In addition to Porter, the Story Lab is led by faculty members representing several U-M schools and colleges:
- María Arquero de Alarcón, associate professor of architecture and urban and regional planning, Taubman College
- Angela Dillard, chair, department of history and Richard A. Meisler Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, history, and in the Residential College
- Melissa Duhaime, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
- Rebecca Hardin, associate professor of natural resources and director of Michigan Sustainability Cases Initiative, School of Environment and Sustainability
- Kristin Hass, associate professor of American culture and director of Humanities Collaboratory, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
- Chauncey Monte-Sano, professor of history and social science education, School of Education
The work of the DRSL was recently profiled in “What Lies Beneath” as well as “Combining Health and Environment Learning on the Detroit River” and “Detroit Youth Launch Row Boats They Helped Build at Riverside Marina
Detroit School of Urban Studies
The idea of a “Detroit School” of Urban Studies grew out of a 2011 interdisciplinary hiring initiative proposal that brought together three units in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts – the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies, the Department of Sociology and the Residential College – as well as the School of Social Work and the Urban and Regional Planning Program in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The title of the proposal was: “Urban Studies: Social Inequality and the Prospects for Equity and Sustainability in Southeastern Michigan.” In May 2014 we designed and hosted a major conference: Learning from Detroit: Turbulent Urbanism in the 21st Century, which brought together local, national and international scholars around questions of what other “distressed but resilient” cities can learn from Detroit, and what Detroit can from other urban centers struggling with process of postindustrial decline and reinvention. The panels were recorded and are viewable on YouTube.Currently there is a faculty cluster and an ongoing speakers series, which receives support from the Rackham Graduate School’s Distinguished Faculty and Graduate Student Seminars program. Professor Dillard serves as one of two faculty co-directors. Please visit the Detroit School website for listings of talks from 2016-2019. Due to COVID-19 restrictions we did not offer a speakers series for 2020-2021, but stay tuned for a running list of recent articles and commentaries by scholars in our community, and events about and taking place in Detroit.
