The Humanities Symposium: Reforming the PhD (TRaCE)
The TRaCE Project is excited to announce the launch of The Humanities Symposium: Reforming the PhD, an international collective as an integral part of the TRaCE Transborder project. It is a platform to discuss strategies for encouraging institutional as well as individual practices that can be promoted to cater to the needs of humanities PhD graduates.
Through essays and discussion posts, the Symposium rethinks and re-invigorates the PhD humanities degree for the contemporary world.
Two key questions animate this project:
- How can we reform the cultures and programs of the humanities PhD lifecycle to meet the needs of students through their degree programs and across multiple sectors of work after graduation?
- How can the humanities reclaim its formative role in public discourse in the larger world?
Sainico Ningthoujam’s essay titled, “The Humanities PhD: Crisis to Cure” has recently been published on the website. It is a critical review of a range of recent work on the humanities PhD and the place of the humanities in the larger world. It traces, summarizes, and puts ongoing debates about the relevance of the humanities PhD and the humanities itself in conversation with each other. Narratives and storytelling are at the heart of TRaCE Transborder and we invite members of the project to address one or both questions by writing short essays in narrative or discursive form (or even a combination of the two). We warmly invite interested members to engage critically and creatively with project’s core themes. With your contributions of ideas and recommendations, we aim to build this space for a stronger and healthier humanities PhD program.
TRaCE Transborder is a partnership of universities and organizations in North America, Europe, Africa, India, China, and Australia that seeks to transform the problem of humanities PhD underemployment into a global opportunity. The project will fashion narrative knowledge about PhD career pathways into an instrument for individual career advancement, international bridge-building, and institutional and social change.