PhD Program in Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities

Posted in News Story  |  Tagged

Reinvent the PhD/H, the Connected Academics project at Georgetown funded by the Mellon Foundation, is seeking faculty to participate in the development of a new PhD program (with an accompanying Certificate Program) in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Public Humanities under the auspices of the Graduate School. 

The program will combine the strengths of scholarly training in the humanities with the experience of applying scholarly training in work environments beyond the university. We want to reinvent doctoral education in the humanities by expanding intellectual discourse beyond the university, by cultivating dialogues with public intellectuals and specialists in non-academic areas, and by expanding the curriculum with training in the methods, practices and skills associated with the public humanities.

This project is a response to the structural problems that threaten the future of doctoral study in the humanities, but also to the marginalization of the humanities in the public world. The challenges include increasingly constrained resources, a changing labor market, a casualization of the academic workforce, and public doubts about the value of the humanities. Given this context, we feel it imperative to work together to demonstrate through programmatic change the wide range of intellectual paths and the wide range of career possibilities that graduate students in the humanities can pursue. Our goals intersect with the recommendations of the 2014 MLA Task Force on Doctoral Education Recommendations.

This project should be of interest to all programs with MAs or PhDs in the humanities as well as to those outside the humanities who wish to participate in an interdisciplinary endeavor. We wish to cast a wide net and include all those who would like to contribute, including faculty from the sciences and social sciences who may not be directly involved, but could serve as consultants to the project.

We will be meeting monthly during the spring semester to produce a detailed proposal for this new doctoral program. We are hoping to involve the traditional humanities disciplines, but also disciplines outside the humanities, in the sciences and social sciences. 

If you have any questions, please contact Kathryn Temple at templek@georgetown.edu. In the meantime, we hope you will forward names of faculty who would like to contribute to this project toreinventphd@georgetown.edu or directly to Kathryn Temple as soon as possible, but no later than January 5, 2016. 

Best regards,

Kathryn Temple, PI, Connected Academics
Torsten Menge, Lab Director, Connected Academics