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
2018 - 2019 Reimagining the Humanities PhD Scholar
Matthew Howard (he/him/his)
Red-Lining and the Green Book: Space and Mobility in Seattle
This documentary and adjoining paper come at a time when Seattle is undergoing immense changes that will alter the dispersal of people of color for decades to come. Due to our current struggles with gentrification, I posit that we as a city should better understand why communities shape the spaces they inhabit, and vice versa. It is critical to know the history of both those spaces and communities. My project historicizes racial segregation in Seattle through an analysis of space, mobility, and access for people of color. The documentary will analyze Seattle’s safe locales from the Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for people of color, alongside former redlining policies in Seattle’s neighborhoods. If we don’t understand why restricted physical mobility and access have crippling effects on the social mobility of people heretofore associated with those spaces (the Central District and International District in particular), we are bound to erase their (his)stories, which makes it all the easier to claim space for fleeting economic growth.