Programs and Initiatives
Collaboration and Crossdisciplinarity
All Center programs are grounded in collaboration and crossdisciplinarity. The Center provides funding and support for fellowship programs, research clusters, graduate student interest groups, conferences, and symposia, allowing faculty and graduate students to exchange ideas and develop individual and collaborative projects together with other faculty, students, visiting scholars, and community practitioners.
Between 2000 and 2013, the Simpson Center funded 126 faculty fellowships and 51 dissertation fellowships supporting scholars from 30 campus units across the humanities, arts, social sciences, and professional schools.
The Center also supports large-scale projects funded by major foundations and agencies. Recent examples include the American Music Partnership with KEXP-FM of Seattle (Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, 2009–2011), the Sawyer Seminar on Now Urbanism (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2010–2012), and Biological Futures in a Globalized World (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 2011–2012).
Public Scholarship
The Simpson Center has gained national recognition for its work advancing scholarship as a publicly engaged practice, a field often referred to as the public humanities. Undertaken with and for diverse communities, public scholarship promotes mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors.
The Certificate in Public Scholarship is a portfolio- and project-based program that enables graduate students and faculty mentors to integrate their scholarly, social, and political commitments in the context of their intellectual and professional development.
Center grants support humanities-based research, teaching, and engagement projects that encourage dialogue, exchange, and collaboration among UW scholars and community members.
The Center hosts the Solomon Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities, which feature leading thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Robin Kelley, Wendy Brown, Anne Balsamo, and Cathy Davidson in events that are free and open to the public.
Digital Humanities
In 2008, the Simpson Center received a $625,000 Challenge Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an endorsement for its plans to raise funds to establish the Digital Humanities Commons, a fellowship program that will support inventive and experimental research inspired by new and emerging technologies in the digital humanities. In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave $600,000 to underwrite the Digital Humanities Commons fund-raising efforts. The fundraising goal was met in February 2013, and beginning Summer 2014, the Simpson Center Digital Humanities Commons will enable UW faculty and graduate students to collaborate with librarians, engineers, and designers in the development, innovation, and exchange of digital research and scholarship.
Simpson Center Initiatives, such as the 2011 Digital Research Summer Institute and the Puget Sounds archives for rare performances of Northwest popular music, are helping to build campus communities of scholarly digital practice.
The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York is a public research institution and post-graduate university in New York City. Serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, The CUNY Graduate Center is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity". The school is situated in the landmark B. Altman and Company Building at 365 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, opposite the Empire State Building. The CUNY Graduate Center has 4,600 students, 31 doctoral programs, 14 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes. A core faculty of approximately 140 is supplemented by over 1,800 additional faculty members drawn from throughout CUNY's eleven senior colleges and New York City's cultural and scientific institutions.
The Open University of Israel is a distance-education university in Israel. It is one of ten public universities in Israel recognized by the Council of Higher Education (CHE). The Open University is unique in that it does not require a matriculation certificate, psychometric exam, or other entrance exam for admission to undergraduate studies.
The Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc. is an American academic and administrative consortium of five private liberal arts colleges in the state of Ohio. It is a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1995 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions.
John Barclay Simpson is a former president of the University at Buffalo (UB), part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. He assumed this position on January 1, 2004, after leaving his position as executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California, Santa Cruz. On August 30, 2010, Simpson announced his retirement from the post of UB President effective January 2011.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a private, nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations in the humanities and related social sciences founded in 1919. It is best known for its fellowship competitions which provide a range of opportunities for scholars in the humanities and related social sciences at all career stages, from graduate students to distinguished professors to independent scholars, working with a number of disciplines and methodologies in the U.S. and abroad.
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provide Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications development, and networked publishing facilities. It cultivates partnerships and participate in humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information technology companies, scholarly organizations, and other groups residing at the intersection of computers and cultural heritage.
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
The Institute for Citizens & Scholars is a nonpartisan, non-profit based in Princeton, New Jersey that aims to strengthen American democracy by “cultivating the talent, ideas, and networks that develop lifelong, effective citizens.” It administers programs that support civic education and engagement, leadership development, and organizational capacity in education and democracy.
HASTAC (/ˈhāˌstak/'), also known as the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, is a virtual organization and platform of more than 18,000 individuals and 400+ affiliate-institutions dedicated to innovative new modes of learning and research. HASTAC network members contribute to the community by sharing work and ideas with others via the open-access website, by hosting HASTAC conferences and workshops online or in their region by initiating conversations, or by working collaboratively with others in the HASTAC network.
Public humanities is the work of engaging diverse publics in reflecting on heritage, traditions, and history, and the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of civic and cultural life. Public humanities is often practiced within federal, state, nonprofit and community-based cultural organizations that engage people in conversations, facilitate and present lectures, exhibitions, performances and other programs for the general public on topics such as history, philosophy, popular culture and the arts. Public Humanities also exists within universities, as a collaborative enterprise between communities and faculty, staff, and students.
The Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) is an interdisciplinary humanities center at Duke University dedicated to supporting humanities, arts, and social science research and teaching. The institute's mission is to encourage humanistic inquiry throughout Duke campus and to raise public awareness of the humanities. Named after the prominent African American historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin, who retired from Duke in 1985 as the James B. Duke professor of history, the institute has also made a commitment to promote scholarship that enhances social equity, especially through research on race and ethnicity.
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) is an interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge. Founded in 2001, CRASSH came into being as a way to create interdisciplinary dialogue across the University’s many faculties and departments in the arts, social sciences, and humanities, as well as to build bridges with scientific subjects. It has now grown into one of the largest humanities institutes in the world and is a major presence in academic life in the UK. It serves at once to draw together disciplinary perspectives in Cambridge and to disseminate new ideas to audiences across Europe and beyond.
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) at Columbia University is a community of scholars affiliated with Columbia's schools, bringing together over 50 full-time faculty, a diverse group of visiting scholars and professionals, and students from the United States and abroad. Its mission is to train new generations of experts on East Asian topics in the humanities, social sciences, and the professions and to enhance understanding of East Asia in the wider community. Since its establishment in 1949 as the East Asian Institute, the WEAI has been the center for modern and contemporary East Asia research, studies, and publication at Columbia, covering China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Mongolia, Tibet, and, increasingly, the countries of Southeast Asia.
University of Florida Center for African Studies (CAS) is a center within of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) at the University of Florida (UF). The Center provides teaching and research into issues of African languages, humanities, social sciences, agriculture, business, engineering, education, fine arts, environmental studies, conservation, journalism, and law.
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.
The Medici Archive Project (MAP) is a research institute whose mission is to disseminate, publish, and teach archival studies, paleography and the cultural legacy of the Medici Grand Dukes. It is based in Florence, Italy and is directed by Alessio Assonitis.
William Pannapacker is a professor emeritus of English and a higher education journalist, consultant, administrator, and fundraiser. He is the author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship, and numerous articles on literature, higher education, and the Digital Humanities published by Cambridge University Press, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Routledge. He was a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1998 to 2014, and he has been a contributor to The New York Times, The North American Review and Slate Magazine. Pannapacker has received $2.3 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He was the founding director of the Mellon Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, from 2009 to 2016; the director of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, from 2013 to 2015; the DuMez Professor of English, from 2015 to 2019; senior director of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative, from 2016 to 2019, and Professor and Senior Director of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Programs and Initiatives at Hope College, from 2019-2022. He is currently a development officer for Chicago Jesuit Academy.
The Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) at the University of Oregon in the United States supports feminist research, teaching, activism and creativity. Established in 1973, it is a non-profit partnership between the Associated Students of the University of Oregon Women's Center and the University. According to the Handbook of Gender, Work, and Organization, CSWS is "a major feminist center for scholarship on gender and women".
Susan Zaeske is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Arts and Arts and Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Christopher P. Long is an American academic, Professor of Philosophy and current Dean of the College of Arts & Letters and the Honors College and MSU Foundation Professor at Michigan State University. He is the author of four monographs, the co-founder of the Mellon-funded Public Philosophy Journal, a primary investigator on the Mellon-funded HumetricsHSS grant, and an advocate for open access.
