The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded approximately $12,200,000 to the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to fund eleven years of an extensive consortium of sixteen partners in the Midwest and beyond. By leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses, the consortium, titled Humanities Without Walls (HWW), aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation.

HWW makes possible two initiatives:

(1) Pre-doctoral Summer Workshops

Humanities Without Walls (HWW) seeks applications from doctoral students pursuing degrees in the humanities and humanistic social sciences for the HWW Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop, to be held from July 17, 2023 to July 28, 2023, in Minneapolis, MN. Students must be in residence in Minneapolis for the duration of the workshop and are expected to attend all workshop activities. Lodging and some meals will be provided; fellowship awards are intended to cover transportation costs to/from and around Minneapolis, meals, and other expenses.

Hosted in 2023 by the University of Minnesota, College of Liberal Arts, the HWW Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop is an intensive, student-centered career exploration program of values discernment and practical preparation for jobs in a variety of sectors, both beyond and within the academy. HWW’s cohort-based approach emphasizes student agency while giving attendees space to reflect on their professional journey. Workshop sessions intentionally lay foundations for the fellows as they do the real-time work of discerning personal career values, building community within their cohort, making professional contacts, and researching potential career paths. Participants will learn how to leverage their skills and humanities training towards careers in the private sector, the nonprofit world, arts administration, public media and many other fields.

The very concept of “humanities without walls” commits us to the work of social justice in the context of career diversity programming, and we work to create sessions which help us grapple with the long history of inequities based on race, indigeneity, gender, and class. Participants are typically invested in the pressing social justice issues of our time and are seeking ways to bring humanistic values, insights, and skills to their work lives, whether in the public, nonprofit, or private sector. Previous HWW Summer Workshop Fellows have come from a variety of humanistic disciplines, with experience in community building, museum curation, filmmaking, radio programming, social media, project management, research, writing, and teaching.

Application Requirements

Interested doctoral students in the humanities should submit their applications to humanities@psu.edu with the subject line HWW Summer Workshop by November 1, 2022. Please combine and submit all application materials as a single PDF file. For more information, visit the 2023 Humanities Without Walls:  Career Diversity Summer Workshop website.

(2) Grand Research Challenge Funding

The Humanities Without Walls Grand Research Challenge (GRC) funds collaborative and interdisciplinary humanities research projects that demonstrate a commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution. These methods are at the heart of HWW’s work to support humanities scholarship that is truly “without walls”; i.e., research that is not only publicly and community engaged but co-designed by all partners in recognition that expertise is located within not just within research universities but also in scholars located in a wide variety of institution types, occupational positions, and the communities.

hww-info@illinois.edu. Application requirements can be viewed here. Applications are due by November 15, 2022 at 11:59 p.m. Central Time.

 Visit Humanities Without Walls

Penn State Humanities Institute is proud to be a founding member of the Humanities Without Walls consortium, and to support the participation of our faculty and graduate students in research partnerships and workshop opportunities.