HPG Graduate Research Assistants: Where are they now?

Luke Borland, MA, Department of History

HPG RA, AY2021-2022

Current Role: Community Relations Specialist, Public Works Department, City of West Linn, OR

"As I work to communicate the need for infrastructure improvements, I find that HPG prepared me well to work interdisciplinary settings and to find the resonances people from differing perspectives share when it comes to a project. I learned from my time in HPG that convening interested parties has a way of uncovering resources and connections that can pre-empt problems with solutions."

Dominic Dongilli, PhD Candidate, Department of American Studies

HPG RA, AY2020-2021

Current Role: Predoctoral Research Fellow, Libraries and Institutional Archives, Smithsonian Institution

"Alongside that individual career development as a humanities practitioner, my perspective on the idea of expertise also shifted. Learning from Director Mangum’s organizing across the institution and weekly meetings with Ashley Cheyemi McNeil, PhD (HPG Postdoc) and Laura Perry, PhD (HPG Postdoc) made clear that expertise is truly the ability to situate one’s work in relationship to a given history, your community, and your efforts to make change. Doing humanities research certainly builds competency and skills like any other task-- we walk away from our accomplishments with proof of our labor. However, the idea of expertise doesn’t come by publicizing that proof. It comes when we activate that knowledge to build relationships and clarify new perspectives to pressing debates as one of many with perspectives and skills to offer."

Victoria Burns, PhD, Department of English

HPG RA, AY2019-2020

Current Role: Freelance Copyeditor

"I think HPG helped me expand my understanding of what humanities might look like and do. I was used to—and comfortable with—thinking about the humanities exclusively within the classroom, but HPG invited me to recognize that not only can humanities thinking take place in the public sphere, but it can be just as important as (if not more important) than the work happening in academic spaces. On a personal level, I also think it helped me give myself permission to explore career paths that weren't just adjacent to, but even removed from, an academic setting without being concerned that I would be "wasting" my graduate degree. Also, HPG's team-oriented and interdisciplinary approach to thinking and to all of its projects was a highlight for me, as I grew so much as a scholar and deepened my thinking in important ways because of the perspectives that other people were consistently contributing."

Before the HPG graduate certificate is launched soon, here are a few courses to consider taking with a strong applied humanities dimension!

URP:6273 Community Development Through Creative Placemaking

Instructor: Travis Kraus

Monday and Wednesday, 3:30 pm - 4:55 pm 134 TH

How do arts and culture contribute to community planning and community identity? How does inclusive planning promote equitable development and economic inclusion for historically marginalized communities? How do we respectfully and authentically engage the culture of a community? This course examines the practices, ideas, and techniques for community development in small to large communities. Particular focus is placed on creative placemaking in which planners and the public “strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.” In this course, students and faculty will apply this approach to a specific community project. Students in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, and planning and public affairs are encouraged to take this class. 

SWW:7820 Writing for Publication in Social Science

Instructor: Megan Gilster

Thursday, 9:30 am - 12:00 pm, 301 NH

Graduate seminar provides practical experience in getting work published in peer-reviewed journals in a variety of disciplines. Using Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, students will explore strategies for planning a writing project, identifying appropriate journals, clarifying arguments, making claims for significance, and organizing material. Students revise a draft (such as a classroom paper, conference paper, or comprehensive exam) into a peer-reviewed article and submit it for publication. In a supportive environment, we will discuss strategies for overcoming resistance to writing. The course is taught by Megan Gilster, who is a writing coach for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, associate professor, and director of the PhD in Social Work. Megan has published in social work and interdisciplinary journals, including the Journal of Urban Affairs, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and the Journal of Urban Health.

CLAS:6290 The Digital Archive

Instructor: Paul Dilley

Monday and Wednesday, 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm, 1015A LIB

This course will introduce humanities students to methods and theories for using digitized written sources, especially those available online, in their research.  The focus is on manuscripts, but print texts will also be considered; similarly, both literary and documentary sources are covered.  Topics include the imaging process and the relationship of the digital surrogate to the material object; software applications/virtual research environments (VREs) for viewing, transcribing, and marking up digitized texts; optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR), and their value for studying unedited corpora; digital and computational paleography; enhanced manuscript imaging for recovering damaged texts; copyright, creative commons and other open source licenses, and how they shape the potential use of digitized images in print and digital publications; and the role of digitization in ongoing discussions about the ethics of cultural heritage management.  Although digital tools will be used in the seminar, no knowledge of coding is assumed.  Moreover, the course is language-agnostic: students can use whatever sources are appropriate to their research in the course, and will be evaluated on their employment and analysis of the methodologies and tools. 

ENGL:6090 Creating With Archives

Instructor: Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

Thursday, 12:30 pm - 3:00 pm, 212 EPB

This seminar will be one of the first Humanities Lab’s at the University of Iowa, a project in partnership with Humanities for the Public Good and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Humanities Labs foreground issues of equity and inclusion with a community partner and are grounded in collaborative, project-based, experiential pedagogy. Our community partner will be the LGBTQ Iowa Archives and Library (LIAL) in Iowa City, a community archives and lending library with a mission to collect, preserve, and share the queer history of Iowa and increase access to queer literature for all ages. Together with LIAL, you will engage in the study and practice of archiving, learning tools in digitization, preservation, and exhibition, alongside emerging philosophical discussions about the role of archives in communities rather than institutions. As we read texts in queer and archival theory, community archiving practices, and ethical community engagement, we will ask: who controls the preservation of history and literature? And then, what do community efforts at preserving and telling one’s own stories look like in practice? We will work with LIAL and others to put on a public-facing festival based on creative approaches to archival research, that decenters scholarly productivity. Rather than the traditional seminar paper, students will be expected to jump in and learn the skills that will benefit our community partner and join in with them as creators, organizers, and thinkers.

AMST:6500 Readings in Cultural Studies - Stuart Hall

Instructor: Deborah Whaley

Wednesday, 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm, 213 EPB

Our course will explore the scholarship of sociologist, activist, and theorist Stuart Hall. In so doing, we will also examine the theories, methods, and history of cultural studies. The course focuses on the major areas of Hall’s work: Marxist thought and the political economy, diasporas and globalization, cultural production and popular culture, film and cinema studies, race, ethnicity, identity, and differánce. It will also cover key theorists that influenced Stuart Hall (e.g., Marx, Foucault, Fanon, Gramsci, and Althusser) and scholars in cultural studies that have made use of Hall’s writings and theories in their own work. Finally, we will consider the role of theory in everyday life and the critical role of public intellectuals. Our course requires a digital portfolio that will consist of writing an Op-Ed for an online journal, a 3 1/2 minute digital story regarding your academic/professional/activist interests in cultural studies, and a 20 minute co-facilitation of one class session. This course is cross-listed with the African American Studies Program and counts toward the graduate certificate in African American Studies and the graduate certificate in Public Digital Humanities.

• The Penn State Humanities Institute, in partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through the Humanities Without Walls Initiative, seeks applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar, beginning Fall 2024. Applications are due January 15, 2024. This is a one-year (48-week) term appointment with an excellent possibility of renewal. We also expect the applicant to complement the Humanities Institute’s Public Humanities Initiative which attempts to put humanities research into contact with the social world. Applicants are encouraged to explain how their work reflects these objectives in their cover letter. Check out the CFA here.

• The Department of Classical Languages and Literatures at Smith College invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin in July 2024. The candidate must also have a record of active engagement with new directions in the Classics field, possibly including but not limited to race and ethnicity in antiquity, environmental issues or science and technology in the ancient world, uses and abuses of the classical tradition and other reception studies, and/or public humanities. Apply by December 15, 2023.

• The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign seeks a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Public Humanities, supported by the Mellon Foundation Humanities Without Walls (HWW) initiative. The postdoctoral fellow will spend the two-year term in residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and pursue a community-based research project rooted in the HWW grant’s guiding methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution. Apply by January 15, 2024.