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
2017 - 2018 Reimagining the Humanities PhD Scholar
Monica Cortés Viharo (she/her/hers)
Tacoma Civil Rights Performance Walk
Inspired by the history of the NAACP and the civil rights movement in Tacoma, Washington, this project proposes a performance walk—an interactive and site-specific tour of historic locations—that incorporates oral histories (written, recorded, or performed), followed by panel discussions or workshops. The performance walk will premier at the Race and Pedagogy Conference at the University of Puget Sound in Fall 2018. This project also commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Tacoma Civil Rights Project (a 2008 exhibition at the Washington State History Museum) and a documentary film by Stanley Lee, Tacoma's Civil Rights Struggle - African Americans Leading the Way, while expanding upon those works.