In the September 10th campus weekly briefing on Covid-19, Provost Susan Collins referred to the Collaboratory’s forthcoming publication Being Human during COVID as an example of UM’s ongoing, robust research.
Provost Collins had been asked, “As restrictions are being lifted, how is the university’s research enterprise faring?”
Provost Collins responded, “When we look at the whole enterprise, researchers are fully engaged and are actually operating above pre-pandemic [levels]. And that’s true for scholarship and engagement in a lot of areas as well.”
Collins continued, “Just to give one quick example, in the humanities and arts, faculty are making really important contributions to our understanding [about] being human during COVID, which is the title of a forthcoming publication by our Humanities [Collaboratory] and the UM Press. So there’s some really good news on the research enterprise front.”
The book Being Human during COVID, which will be released in November, documents the first year of the pandemic in real time, bringing together humanities scholars from the University of Michigan to address what it feels like to be human during the COVID-19 crisis. The contributors in this collection draw on scholarly expertise and lived experience to try to make sense of the unfamiliar present in works that range from traditional scholarly essays, to personal essays, to visual art projects.