As of October 31, 2025 this website is for historical purposes. Funding for the Humanities Collaboratory was not extended beyond this date. This website will no longer be updated.
• Read the Humanities Collaboratory Final Report.
• The Humanities Assessment Hub is live! This easy-to-use, searchable archive offers resources to help scholars, department chairs, and institutional leaders recognize the full range of humanities scholarship — including collaborative, digital, public-facing, and experimental work. Designed to strengthen tenure and promotion practices, the Hub provides practical tools for recognizing and assessing diverse forms of scholarship.
Our fantastic experiment has come to an end.
2015 – 2025
The Michigan Humanities Collaboratory was a bold investment by the university in collaborative, multi-generational, inclusive and transformational humanities scholarship that engages compelling questions for the academy and the world beyond. Born in the Office of the Provost, housed in LSA, and located in the Hatcher Graduate Library, the Humanities Collaboratory built a research development infrastructure to support humanities research at the University of Michigan. We also worked to develop tools for assessment and we provided 5×5 and Proposal Development grants to support innovative and ambitious forms of humanities scholarship. Our mission was to give humanists access to significant resources to enable new kinds of work on the remarkable diversity of human experience across the globe.
The Humanities Collaboratory has been a bold and successful investment in the future of humanities research. With over 500 participants from 12 of U-M’s 19 schools and colleges, the Collaboratory has awarded 72 competitive grants (across Incubator, Proposal Development, and Project Grants), resulting in a remarkable range of outputs to date: 186 scholarly presentations in five languages on five continents; over 75 published articles; 35 exhibitions; 21 performances; 21 podcast episodes; 20 widely accessed websites; 8 monographs and 2 edited volumes; 6 courses; 4 films and 1 video series; 2 apps; 1 children’s book; 1 comic book; and 1 graphic novel. Much of this work has been produced in collaboration with 67 community organizations.
Importantly, our teams have brought in at least $13.3 million in external funding—a significant return on the University’s initial $10 million investment.
The Collaboratory has affirmed that collaborative, public, and engaged humanities research is a wise and forward-looking institutional investment.
Projects
Praise for Being Human During COVID (2021):
“Highly recommended… Instructors in many disciplines, but particularly those interested in digital humanities, may want to use selections from the book in their classes. General readers may find comfort and inspiration in these authors’ varied responses to the global pandemic.”
— Review in Choice vol. 59, no.10 (June 2022), by A. White, Grand Valley State University
News
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Farewell and Thank You
A Letter from Kristin Hass Dear Friends and Collaborators, Our fantastic experiment has come to an end. We are enormously proud of what our scholars—faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and community partners of all stripes—have achieved. The Michigan Humanities Collaboratory has been a bold and successful investment in the futureof humanities research. The Collaboratory has served…
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2021-23 Project Grant Team Wins National Award
A Collaboratory project grant team celebrates a significant national honor as project PIs Ricky Punzalan and Deirdre de la Cruz along with an interdisciplinary team have received the prestigious Council Exemplary Service Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award recognizes the innovative and collaborative ReConnect/ReCollect initiative, which is working to transform how culturally-sensitive archival materials are cared for, described, and shared…
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From the Isfahan Archive Project
Imagine being immersed in the study of a historic place like Isfahan, yet unable to experience the city first-hand: to walk through its winding medieval streets and grand tree-lined boulevards, to gaze at the calligraphy on the lapis and turquoise-tiled walls and domes of its mosques, or to converse with its residents, perhaps over a…
I’m very excited to have that commitment from my own institution, from the University of Michigan, to do humanities research in a collaborative format.”
— Johannes von Moltke, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Film, Television and Media
5×5 Incubator Grants
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New 5×5 Team – Anthropology Across Four Subfields
Decolonizing anthropology has become a rallying cry across the four subfields of Anthropology–Socio-Cultural, Biological, Archaeological, and Linguistic. At the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology, one among the few remaining programs in the country that expresses a commitment to a four-field education, efforts to critique and re-envision the anthropological canon have taken diverse but disparate…
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New 5×5 Team – Ancient Theories of Love and Friendship
This project will bring together ethicists, classicists, and scholars of ancient Greek philosophy to discuss ancient Greek theories of love and friendship. The sessions, each lead by a different faculty member, will center on a close philosophical, linguistic, and historical examination of ancient Greek source material concerning love and friendship. Team members (5) bring a…
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New 5×5 Team – Historicizing the Public/Private Distinction
This 5×5 convenes a group of scholars broadly interested in interrogating the historical origins of the public/private distinction in economic and political life. They are interested in understanding how the divide between private and public life is understood, how that divide has changed historically and fed into evolving conceptions of the common good, and how…