Public Scholarship
The Simpson Center advances scholarship as a publicly engaged practice, promoting mutually beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors and providing pathways for scholars to share their academic work with broader public audiences.
Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics
This four-year program, launched in summer 2015, forges innovative forms of scholarship and teaching beyond traditional academic circles, supported by a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Reimagining the PhD Blog
A forum on new approaches to graduate education, teaching, and scholarship.
Certificate in Public Scholarship
This groundbreaking program provides graduate students an opportunity to integrate their scholarly and social commitments in the context of their intellectual and professional development.
Public Scholarship Course Archive
A collection of past, current, and future courses involving publicly-engaged teaching.
Public Scholarship/Community Engagement Awards
These awards support humanities-based research, teaching, and engagement projects that promote dialogue, exchange, and collaboration between UW scholars and the greater Seattle community. (Learn more about applying.)
2018-19 Awards
- Prison Education Collaboration, a longer-term project gathering teachers from across campuses and prisons to create a model for inside-outside collaboration.
- Texts and Teachers, a curriculum development program and university/high school collaboration running since 2000
Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities
This lecture series features leading thinkers such as Cathy N. Davidson, Doris Sommer, and Robin D. G. Kelley in events that are free and open to the public
Past and Ongoing Programs and Projects
- Where the House Was—documentary film about the Hugo House literary hub
- SeaTac-Seattle Minimum Wage Campaign History Project
- Seattle’s Freeway Revolt: A Living Legacy of Civic Activism
- Women Who Rock, an oral history archive hosted by the UW Libraries Digital Initiatives Program; annual participant-driven conference and film festival; and project-based coursework for graduate student and undergraduates.
- Transformative Education Behind Bars, a project on teaching in regional correctional facilities and expanding educational access for incarcerated students
- Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students, an intensive week-long exploration of diverse practices of community-based cultural research, teaching, and engagement for graduate fellows
Find more in the Public Scholarship archive.
