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
2016 - 2017 Reimagining the Humanities PhD Scholar
María Elena García (she/her/hers)
The Animals Are Coming
This project, a collaboration with Louisa Mackenzie proposes a team-taught graduate seminar in Intersectional Animal Studies to build from and model trans-departmental, intersectional, and public scholarship in the humanities. A co-taught seminar can provide a fulcrum for interdisciplinary conversations and approaches from which students, faculty, and the public alike can learn. We find that a powerful way to reimagine the humanities PhD is to explore the ways in which the humanities have moved beyond the constraints of the human.