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
Alan-Michael Weatherford (he/him/his)
Heritage Language Teaching and Learning Beyond Bars
This project with Angela Durán Real will develop a co-taught heritage-learner and pedagogical methods course through participatory and horizontal modes of civic engagement. The impetus behind such a course stems from a research question: How can we utilize and collaborate with the knowledge that incarcerated communities already produce to create the necessary structures that make college education in prison sustainable? By collaboratively working with the Hispanic population inside the Monroe Correctional Complex, this project facilitates understanding of how to build communities of learning inside the prison in ways that make them sustainable and perhaps even self-sustaining.