Reimagining the PhD Cohort
In July 2015, the Simpson Center launched Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics with the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The conviction animating this initiative was that doctoral education, especially at a public university, must be guided by a capacious vision of its fundamental purpose: to contribute to the public good. From 2015-2021, the program prepared UW doctoral students in the humanities for this task by meaningfully connecting them to the diverse, access-oriented institutions of higher education in the Seattle District community colleges, and by supporting the development of both doctoral students’ public projects and publicly engaged graduate seminars taught by UW faculty in the humanities. Find out more about our programming below.
2021 - 2022 Scholars
2020 - 2021 Reimagining the Humanities PhD Scholar
Alika Bourgette (he/him/his)
An Interactive Detour of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909)
Alika Bourgette and Frances O’Shaughnessy’s project will provide an interactive detour and accompanying exhibit of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909). Hosted at the present site of the University of Washington, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition placed colonized peoples on display in a public spectacle of agriculture, industry, and development. Through an online podcast and exhibit of the Exposition, this collaborative project seeks to reframe the Exposition as a performance of carcerality. By considering how colonized peoples on display viewed the viewer, the interactive detour hopes to engage participants in disembodiments from proprietary, alienating relations under the US Empire, so that ancestors and descendants may perform re-embodiments of loving and caring relations in a different world.