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
2021 - 2022 Reimagining the Humanities PhD Scholar
Charles LaPorte (he/him/his)
Poetry and Other Public Writing: or, Literary Genre Theory Today
Charles LaPorte (in partnership with Anis Bawarshi) will re-design his course on literary genre theory in an attempt to better acknowledge and reflect the public-facing nature of much literature and literary scholarship. In literary studies, scholars sometimes fail to consider the public instances of their pet subjects, or they emphasize private experience à la John Stuart Mill’s famous description of poetry as emotion “confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.” (Ideas like this one don’t help us much with poems like Amanda Gorman’s 2021 contribution to President Biden’s inauguration ceremony: “The Hill We Climb.”) Then, too, much of today’s best literary criticism is found not in scholarly journals but in high-end journalism, both in paper and online. The liveliest parts of the literary world may often be found beyond the walls of the academy.