This website is a product of the collaborative vision developed by a group of humanities doctoral students and faculty involved in an Andrew W. Mellon grant on The Humanities Doctorate in the Twenty-First Century.
Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation from 2014-2017, this grant project takes as its critical goal the rethinking of the humanities PhD for twenty-first century contexts and challenges. Through this work, we are engaged in three interdependent efforts: to provide meaningful opportunities for our doctoral students to explore wider career horizons; to integrate broader skills development and larger-world questions into graduate training; and to support faculty committed to innovation in PhD curricula and thoughtful support of a range of student career paths.
As part of these efforts, a working group of eight faculty and four graduate students, coming from ten departments, met during May 2016 to explore the current state of the humanities job market, the pressures on graduate students as they prepare for it, and the possibilities for programmatic and curricular transformation designed to aid and guide preparation for multiple career paths. This website, one of the results of our collaborative work, is designed to offer resources for humanities doctoral students and the faculty who teach and advise them. It provides ready access for doctoral students to a broad range of resources as they pursue wider career paths and for faculty, to ideas, initiatives, and best practices as they imagine and develop new approaches to the curriculum to support student scholarly and professional development.
Over three summers, through 2017, Mellon funding will enable humanities doctoral students to pursue immersive experiences and summer fellowships, and so to explore a diversity of potential employment venues, among them museums, non-profit organizations, state and national foundations, academic advising offices, and university development offices. Over the course of the grant project, faculty in twelve departments will develop mini-courses or workshop series aimed at expanding the repertoire of intellectual, collaborative, and management capacities humanities doctoral students can take with them on the job market and throughout their careers within and outside the academy. Explore these activities in greater depth.
Doctoral students both desire and benefit from opportunities to reflect on and plan for different possible futures. Likewise, faculty benefit from having access to resources that enable them to mentor students in these pursuits through curricular innovation, thoughtful course design and engagement in the larger project of program innovation. The Humanities PhD Project hopes to assist both faculty and students in their efforts as well as to provide the broader public with an understanding of the multitude of ways humanists can and do contribute to their communities and to the global context.
The Humanities PhD Project Web Team
Arthur Verhoogt, Project Leader
Matthew Woodbury, Site Administrator
Jessica Wolking, LSA Web Services
Past Contributors
Nina Barraco
Sara Blair
Kevin Carr
Deborah Keller-Cohen
Nora Krinitsky
Joshua Kupetz
Christina La Rose
Shana Melnysyn
Laura Schram
Sid Smith
Sarah Suhadolnik