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…
Category: News
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…
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…
The Black Feminist Historical Methods Project
What happens when we look beyond the surface of history — not just at the evidence we collect, but at what we choose to do with it? This provocative question is at the heart of The Black Feminist Historical Methods Project, a dynamic initiative exploring understated research methods in the historical profession and the interdisciplinary field of Black…
The Deadness Project: Death, Dying, and the Departed in the Postdigital Decline
As we reach the halfway point of 2025, proclamations of death abound: The Internet is dead. The U.S. tech industry is dead. Capitalism? Dead, along with democracy. Stories circulate of our dying climate and seed vaults prepared against agricultural apocalypse. Claims proliferate that millions of the deceased are collecting Social Security. From every digital corner,…
Religion in Real Time: Teaching Religion as a Resource at a Public University
Does broaching religion in a university context make you squirm in your seat? You’re not alone. Rebecca Wollenberg, Sangseraima Ujeed, and Deborah Forger spend a lot of time thinking about the perceived tension between religion and the values of academic freedom and intellectual pluralism on university campuses. Together with three student research assistants, they form…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
New 5×5 Team – Critical Approaches to Sound
This 5×5 cohort consists of scholars interested in critical approaches to sound more broadly, and music, more specifically. They come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (History, English, American Studies, Musicology), but share an interest in how sound and music provide a critical lens into a global histories of race and empire. They intend to…
THE LIFESPAN PROJECT: STORIES OF WASTE AND MEMORY
The Lifespan Project, one of our four 2024 Proposal Development Grant teams, interrogates the concept of lifespan in things material and immaterial as it looks at the used, rotten, and obsolete; death and grief through three intersecting stories. Composed of undergraduate students in Architecture and English, graduate students from Comparative Literature, and three faculty members from Architecture; AfroAmerican andAfrican Studies; English;…
Thinking Through Election Overload: Patriotism and Country Music
Thinking Through Election Overload: Patriotism and Country Music: Who Owns What? Remember the Olympics? Just a few months ago, Americans from across the political spectrum came together in a three-week ritual of raucous flag waving, chanting, and cheering. But those good feelings barely survived the Closing Ceremonies. Also immediately after the Olympics, a wave of…
Collaboratory Announces Second Annual Research Orientation Series
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…
Thinking Through Election Overload: Olympic Patriotism V. Election Patriotism
Thinking Through Election Overload: Olympic Patriotism V. Election Patriotism? Remember the Olympics? Just a few months ago, Americans from across the political spectrum came together in a three-week ritual of raucous flag waving, chanting, and cheering. But those good feelings barely survived the Closing Ceremonies. Also immediately after the Olympics, a wave of memes announced…
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)…