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
2019 - 2020 Reimagining the Humanities PhD Scholar
Jessica Holmes (she/her/hers)
Public Activism in the Humanities
This seminar examines the relationship between activism and scholarship by exploring the history of public activism, the different genres and forms of activism, the deployment of social media in today’s climate, the methods of tracking public outreach and mobilization, and the types of texts that lay the groundwork for and emerge from activism. Emphasis will be placed on current environmental activism, but the seminar will seek to engage and compare a variety of social movements including human rights, Black Lives Matter, indigenous peoples’ rights, disability rights, #MeToo, Occupy Wall Street and animal rights.