Programming Approaches
Humanities centers and institutes often function as the organizer of interdisciplinary discussions. Although the focus of every HCI is different, they almost always have some kind of calendar of events that are open to faculty, students, and/or the community.
Finding Partner Organizations
While some CHCI members maintain rather robust offerings, your HCIs need not develop an entire calendar alone. Instead, a calendar can be a patchwork of events you are organizing and a larger number of co-sponsored events. Co-sponsoring existing events around campus not only increases the potential audience, but also reduces the administrative burden among a larger support staff: both appreciated in the higher education space.
Bookstores, libraries, school systems, community centers, and museums are all local institutions whose work often overlaps with the humanities. Bookstores, for example, often have author readings, poetry nights, and book festivals that are natural parts of a humanities calendar. Offering event space, free advertising, and light refreshments are low-cost forms of sponsorship that build affinity and comity with local businesses.
To enhance visibility, consider the following methods of publicity:
- Get your center’s events on your parent institution’s main calendar;
- Disseminate a weekly or monthly email newsletter to partners;
- Encourage faculty to include events on their syllabi
- Enroll community partners with newsletters
For Faculty and Students
The activities at any humanities center or institute can be broken down as those focused on humanities faculty and students, and those focused on the wider campus and community’s intellectual environment. While there is undoubtedly overlap between these various audiences, there are important distinctions. In general, programs focused on faculty and students tend to be smaller, more intensive, and outcome-oriented. These programs are organized around filling a specific intellectual and professional need among your faculty and student stakeholders.
Working Groups
The size and reach of your programming will depend in some part on the resources at your disposal, which vary greatly across CHCI. But an HCI programs also vary considerably in their formality. At UC Berkeley, for example, their center supports a vast range of Working Groups, organized by two or three faculty, that serve as informal forums for discussing works in progress. The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Manitoba offers modest funding—for “costs of meetings, photocopying, visiting speakers, and so on”—for faculty “research clusters.”
When setting up a working group, it is important to establish exactly what the group is supposed to do, how often they are expected to meet, the forms of support they will receive, and the deliverable they are expected to produce. For the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, working groups can apply for yearly funding for “visitors, refreshments, materials, and other related costs.” Their rules further stipulate the size and composition of each group, the minimum number of meetings semesterly and annually, and the types of activities they support.
- Working Groups - Jackman Humanities Institute - University of Toronto
- Working Groups – Townsend Center - University of California, Berkeley -
- Research Clusters – University of Manitoba
Fellowship Programs
Fellowship programs vary greatly as well. There are some institutions, such as the Stanford Humanities Center or the Institute for Advanced Study at University of Western Australia, that provide fellowships to visiting faculty and students. But faculty support need not be one size. The Humanities Center at Georgia State University builds affinity among humanities faculty by offering $1,000 and office space to faculty who already have been given course releases. Such support, however modest, can go a long way to building interdisciplinary discussions and connection between faculty and your HCI, and demonstrate your HCI’s centrality as a hub of campus intellectual work.
- The Gledden Fellowships – IAS – University of Western Australia
- Fellowship Application – Georgia State University
- Manuscript Review Program – University of Tennessee Knoxville
- Manuscript Review Workshop – Stanford Humanities Center – Stanford University
- Funding – Kule Institute – University of Alberta
- Kule Scholar Program - Kule Institute - University of Alberta
Humanities Courses and Labs
A number of centers around CHCI organize interdisciplinary humanities courses. The Higgins School of the Humanities at the Clark University offers undergraduates three thematic courses in the humanities. The Cogut Institute at Brown University fosters team-taught graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, and offers a certificate for graduate students.
- Classroom Engagement – Higgins School of Humanities – Clark University
- Curriculum – Cogut Institute for the Humanities – Brown University
For undergraduate-focused institutions, centers also serve as organizing places for Humanities Labs: interactive spaces where students get hands-on experience. At Colby College, Humanities labs encourage students to make arts projects alongside their cultural and literary studies. At Duke Kunshan University, the Humanities Research Center is working with other on-campus units to develop a student-led, faculty-supervised research projects that explore the qualitative dimensions of Chinese and international student life.
- Third Space Lab – Duke Kunshan University
- Humanities Labs at Colby College – Colby College
- Labs at FHI - Franklin Humanities Institute – Duke University
- Humanities Labs – Miami University
- Experimental Humanities Lab – Indiana University
Undergraduate Grants, Awards, and Programs
CHCI member organizations have run a number of undergraduate grants and awards. Smaller in scale than faculty and graduate grants and awards, such efforts enhance student engagement in the humanities. A center does not necessarily need to invest in humanistic research. At Johns Hopkins University, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute provides modest support to humanities majors seeking professional internships.
- Undergraduate Student Opportunities – Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. - - Johns Hopkins University
- Humanities Gateway Internship in Public Media and Civic Engagement – HRI – University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
- A full suite of programming – Humanities Institute – Wake Forest University
For Campus and Community
The events and programs of humanities centers and institutes are part of the larger intellectual environment of your campus and community. As the growing field of the health and medical humanities demonstrates, humanities scholars can make important contributions to fields traditionally misunderstood to be outside the purview of humanistic inquiry.
Public and K-12 Courses
If you have the resources, you can also run short-courses on humanities topics. The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as a stand-alone non-profit, runs courses on a range of humanities-related subjects on a monthly basis in the NYC region. The Alexander Grass Institute offers free, five-week, online courses during the summer, led by faculty specialists. At Fairfield, faculty affiliated with the Humanities Institute organize American Studies workshops for area K-12 teachers.
- Courses – Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
- Humanities Blast Courses – Alexander Grass Humanities Institute -Johns Hopkins University
- American Studies Workshop for Teachers – Humanities Institute - Fairfield University
Annual Humanities Theme
Another approach that has proven successful for CHCI members is the development of an annual theme that ties together all the disparate parts of your humanities programming. Developing an annual theme is an opportunity for you and your partners to think strategically for the medium and long-term. Typically introduced by an essay from the director, a theme provides an organizing principle for the types of projects you want to work on and creates opportunities to try to new projects or build new partnerships. In addition, you can string themes together across multiple calendars to keep campus and community partners engaged.
An annual humanities theme also allows for other campus and community groups to frame their events in different ways to convey programming intentionality. The annual theme thereby highlights an underlying unity between faculty presentations, invited speakers, undergraduate courses, community events, and local exhibitions: events that are often framed as discrete.
As an example, the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia, they organize courses, events, research projects, and resources in their interdisciplinary, multi-year “Labs.”
Annual Themes