Welcome
The Humanities Collaboratory is 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 is building permanent research development infrastructure to support humanities research at the University of Michigan. We are also working to develop tools for assessment and we are continuing to give 5×5 and Proposal Development grants to support innovative and ambitious forms of humanities scholarship. Our mission is to give humanists access to significant resources to enable new kinds of work on the remarkable diversity of human experience across the globe.
… work in the humanities is critical to living in a world that’s increasingly interdependent and complex and often mysterious.”
—Sara Blair, Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Vice Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs
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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Collaboratory Gallery Exhibition
Come see an exhibit featuring highlights from the Collaboratory’s work over the last ten years, including team posters, event programs, and a picture slideshow of our teams. The exhibit is located in the Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery and is available during normal library operating hours through August 22.
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Humanities Assessment Hub
For the past year, the Collaboratory has been building the Humanities Assessment Hub, a website with documents and resources to support collaborative, engaged researchers as they navigate the promotion and tenure process. To that end, the Collaboratory hosted a one-day workshop on 4/18/25 with esteemed colleagues who will serve as the steering committee for the……
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Being Human in the Academy: Celebrating 10 Years of Experiments in Collaborative Humanities
April 17, 2025 bore witness to ‘Humanities Prom’ — how the Collaboratory staff have referred to the Collaboratory’s final celebratory event: Being Human in the Academy: Celebrating 10 Years of Experiments in Collaborative Humanities. As high school seniors prepare for prom by putting on their finest clothes for a night meant to celebrate how far they……
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……