The Humanities Collaboratory is offering its second annual Research Orientation Series beginning in September 2024. This is a series of four events created for new humanities faculty at the University of Michigan. Participants will leave each event with a clearer understanding of the landscape of humanities scholarship funding and armed with contacts to provide help…
Category: News
Election Overload: Olympic Patriotism V. Election Patriotism
Thursday, October 3 2024 5:30-7:00 PM Lobby Thayer Academic Building About the series: High Stakes Culture explores the ongoing “culture wars” and recent cultural flashpoints igniting across the country. Activists from all points of the political spectrum are turning to beloved cultural objects to stake a claim for their differing beliefs. The foundations of public education…
I Walk Under the Earth; Lightly in a Cloud of 300,000 Points. A Portal to the Ancient City of Teotihuacán Through LiDAR Surveys, Digital Preservation, and Immersive Storytelling
The center of the Mesoamerican universe lies twenty kilometers northeast of Mexico City in the ancient city of Teotihuacán. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the site receives 4.5 million visitors annually. The Aztecs called it the place where the gods were created, and it remains Mesoamerica’s cosmological and spiritual heart. As…
Collaboratory Presents Work at New Directions in the Humanities Conference
The Collaboratory took its work on the assessment of non-traditional forms of humanities scholarship on the road to present a workshop at the New Directions in the Humanities Conference hosted by La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, June 26-28. The Collaboratory, in its current iteration, has been tasked with creating tools and sharing resources to support and promote collaborative,…
Nishnaabeg Team Celebrates Learning Opportunities
Two members of the From Revitalization to Reclamation: Reinforcing Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies at the University and Beyond Proposal Development Grant team attended The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) conference in early June. Kayla Gonyon (Lecturer in American Culture, Ojibwe Language) and Skyelar Raiti (Undergraduate Research Assistant) traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, where the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC)…
Do Androids Study Electric Humanities?
AI is everywhere you look these days. What used to only be a part of science fiction books and movies is now helping write papers, draft invitations, produce fanciful images, and even streamline our google searches. However, while AI has shown itself to be a helpful taskmaster, it is not without cause that many of us are ambivalent…
Nubian Lives Animated Film Celebrates Film Festival Acceptances
Hanina/Homesick, an animated film produced by The Narrating Nubia project led by Yasmin Moll, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, has been selected by the Annecy International Animation Film Festival to compete in the Perspectives category, the Arab American National Museum’s Film Festival in Dearborn, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival. The short film follows a young Nubian girl as she embarks on a journey…
New Proposal Development Grant Teams
The Humanities Collaboratory welcomes four Proposal Development Grant teams for our current grant cycle! I Walk Under the Earth; Lightly, in a Cloud of 300,000 Points. A Portal to the Ancient City of Teotihuacán through LiDAR Surveys, Digital Preservation, and Immersive Storytelling is led by PI Robert Adams from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Design. This project seeks to…
The Future is Human/e: Preservationists, Afterlives, and Longevities
The Future is Human/e is one of three 5×5 teams the Collaboratory accepted in April. This team is led by Sarah Murray, Assistant Professor in the department of Film, TV, Media, and Digital Studies. This team will investigate the meanings of longevity, death, and speculative futures in a post-digital, post-capitalist, and post-eco-crisis world. Their investigation includes discussions…
Using the Tools of the Future to Find Patterns in the Past
Tools of the Future/ Patterns of the past is one of three new 5x5s the Collaboratory has accepted in April. This team is led by Giulia Saltini Semerari, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. This team will reflect on the power, risks, and limitations of deploying AI in the context of navigating academic publications in the humanities, utilizing work…
Music and AI
Music and AI is one of three new 5×5 teams we have accepted in April. This team is led by Julie Zhu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts and Technology. This team will explore how the impact of AI on composers and musicians, as well as how it can be utilized for creation and research in…
The Ambivalence Project Celebrates Launch of Guidelines
The Ambivalence Project, partnering with Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, has launched their messaging guide, “Ambivalence as an Opportunity for Social Change.” It can be downloaded for free at: http://goodwinsimon.com/ambivalence. The Ambivalence Project, led by P.I. Valerie Traub, was composed of 5 faculty, 2 graduate students, and 1 staff person located in LSA and the Medical…
Inside the Launch of the Black Washtenaw County Website
The Black Washtenaw County Team (BWC) launched their website, the Black Washtenaw County Collaboratory, in early December, marking a major achievement for the group in making their project accessible to the general public. Meghana Tummala, a Wallenberg Fellow and recent Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning graduate, joined the team over a year ago.…
New 5×5 Team, Public Facing Studies of Religion
The Public Facing Studies of Religion team is comprised of faculty members with backgrounds in a variety of religious scholarly studies. They will meet to share and analyze techniques for disseminating public facing versions of research on religion. Topics they will discuss include the phenomena of scholarship on religion being mistaken as proselytizing and the complications of pressures inherent to religious…
Collaboratory to Host Research Infrastructure Events
The Collaboratory, as part of our effort to build lasting humanities research infrastructure, is offering a series of upcoming orientations. On March 7, “Research Resources: Landscape of External Funding,” will give humanists a slimmed down peek into what the search for external funding looks like and help early career faculty to identify potential funding institutions. The…
Media, Technology, Geopolitics and Social Change in the BRICS+ Countries
We welcome Media, Technology, Geopolitics and Social Change in the BRICS+ Countries team to the Collaboratory with a 5×5 Incubator grant. With an interdisciplinary approach to media, this team will focus on BRICS+ countries – namely India, China, Russia and Nigeria – to assess how uses, practices, and understandings of media, art, and technology reproduce…
Documenting Endangered Languages
The team, as a recent recipient of a 5×5 Incubator grant, will focus on language documentation, especially endangered languages, which includes over 90% of the languages in the world today. The team’s goal is to create a critical mass of synergy and brainstorm on major issues in language documentation, such as a practical protocol for language…
Anti-Colonial Global South Studies: Research, Learning, and Community Engagement
A new team joins the Collaboratory with a 5×5 Incubator grant. This team will discuss alternative frameworks rooted in anti-colonial histories of the Global South to rethink mainstream knowledge production practices in the Global North drawing from different research, learning, and community engagement traditions. Motivating questions include: What does it mean to practice anti-colonial research, pedagogy,…
Critical Pedagogy in Romance Languages and German
We are happy to announce the award of a new 5×5 team. This project unites scholars in Romance Languages and Literatures and Germanic Languages and Literatures who teach upper-division, interdisciplinary courses on race, class, gender, and sexuality through literature, film, history, and critical theory. The team hopes to lay the foundation to conduct research on the topic of…
From Revitalization to Decolonization: Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies
A 5×5 Incubator Grant has been awarded to From Revitalization to Decolonization; Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies. This team’s members will engage in research to improve language pedagogy and build members awareness of issues relevant to understudied languages and more specifically for documenting and sustaining the Ojibwe dialect historically spoken in the area. They also…