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
Lynn M. Thomas (she/her/hers)
Environmental Histories in the Anthropocene
What is the Anthropocene and the role of history within it? What are the stakes of telling environmental histories in the 21st century? What kinds of history are needed? In this co-taught course, Linda Nash and Lynn M. Thomas approach the Anthropocene by asking students to consider how histories of colonialism, race, inequality, capitalism, and consumerism are deeply intertwined with histories of the environment. Students will study and research the environmental and social/political histories of our surrounding region—the Pacific Northwest—and one site, farther afield, in Africa. In both cases, students will collaborate on “public-facing” projects in order to reach broader audiences and to show how thinking more deeply, broadly, and comparatively about the past might lead to a better understanding of our planetary predicament.