Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public

Description

The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities invites nominations of University of Washington faculty members for the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public. The award honors Barclay Simpson’s transformative gift in endowing the Simpson Center in memory of his father and highlights one of the center’s core missions: to foster the humanities as a public good. Our conviction is that we must find ways to meaningfully engage with public audiences and communities beyond the academy even as we maintain our commitments to research addressed to academic audiences. The prize carries an award of $10,000. 

Public scholarship takes many shapes. Faculty may write for audiences beyond strictly defined academic circles and may work across digital platforms to make their work open, accessible, and inviting to a larger public. They may create experimental modes of presentation and dissemination of their scholarship. They may work in teams as they pursue community-engaged inquiry, collaborating with museums and other cultural institutions, curating exhibitions and festivals. They may form partnerships with other institutions of higher education, forging strong curricular ties across the higher-educational landscape. They may establish new and ongoing forums for community debates on challenging matters of public policy. They may build digital archives and databases of cultural artifacts, interviews, and other material that will be foundational for present and future inquiry. The history of the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public offers a set of examples of excellence in publicly- and community-engaged humanities scholarship: 

• The inaugural Barclay Simpson Prize for Public Scholarship was awarded in 2015 to James Gregory (History). Gregory was recognized for the collaborative Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, an expansive set of websites presenting regional history to the public, which has informed public policy, high school history curriculum, and scholarship across a number of humanities disciplines. 
• In 2017, the Prize was awarded to Michelle Habell-Pallán (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies), whose deeply collaborative Women Who Rock and American Sabor projects have created new forms of knowledge production, established and sustained new communities of practice, and produced transformative workshops, exhibitions, and more. Her archival work, held as a digital collection in the University of Washington Libraries, documents women who use pop music as a tool for social transformation, claiming a place for women musicians, critics, and fans. 
• In 2019, Gillian Harkins (English) was awarded the Prize for her longstanding commitment to pedagogies of prison abolition and collaborative higher education programs behind and beyond bars. Her facilitation of projects that center currently and formerly incarcerated people, while collaborating with various groups to identify and develop pathways from inside prison to college campuses, is dedicated to increasing access to higher education for those who face the greatest barriers to it. 
• In 2021, Ralina Joseph (Communication) was awarded the prize for her project, “Interrupting Privilege,” an intergenerational, skills-building, and anti-racist space for dialogue and critique. This cross-institutional project, which included a curated exhibition at the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) in Seattle, argues that everyday people can work together across generations to combat racism with the support of youth leadership, commitment to critique-in-action, spaces to share and hear racial hurt, and careful training modules. 

We encourage the nomination of UW tenure-track faculty from disciplines and departments in the humanities and humanistic social sciences whose work exemplifies the concept of scholarship as a contribution to the public good. For the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public we put the stress on scholarship, not service, although the two may well be intertwined. 

Nominating letters by members of the UW faculty should include a description of the public scholarship undertaken by the faculty member and an evaluation of its impact and influence; letters of nomination should not be more than 1,000 words. Nominations may be accompanied by up to two additional letters of support, no more than 500-750 words.