Purpose and passion: innovating humanities research at Duke University

[Humanities Watch has posted information about the $3 million Mellon Foundation grant here]

HW: How did the idea for the grant come about?

GW: We had an unprecedented “Humanities Writ Large” grant from Mellon. This grant set up the basis for the current plan, which builds upon the idea that the humanities are everywhere, “unbounded”; and they are already project-based, collaborative, and dynamic.

We are now embedding the successful humanities lab model of the earlier grant into the curriculum in an intentional way. The previous labs were extracurricular and more separate from classrooms and courses. The new focus is on undergraduate education, and how we can now establish this dynamic model for students working in the humanities, with departments taking a lead role.What I’m hoping for out of the lab portion is that we are able to highlight the opportunities that the humanities have for undergraduate students in terms of mentored research: how this research can be engaging and start earlier in a student’s education; how it can focus on research as a process that foregrounds how we do humanistic inquiry. A process  that allows us to change our questions as we move forward. That process is so valuable, not just the final outcome. The more we can link it with classes, where students can work with one another and with graduate students and faculty, the more dynamic it will be. And it will draw in more students. Whatever the final project might contain, it is important to value the process as a valuable part of the learning experience. The humanities have always been collaborative, even with its more traditional models: we are always drawing on other people’s expertise, including peer-to-peer conversations.

The Visiting Faculty Fellows Program has also been slightly revised in response to results from the earlier grant. We are now asking: what happens after the Fellows return to the home institutions? How can we continue to offer them institutional support, a kind of consultancy of experts, that can work with their home administrations and support structures? So now we can offer a second-year of bridge funding to help with this transition in many areas, for example digital support and library support, in order to help the faculty members share their findings with their colleagues and establish their research projects back on their campuses.

The final prong of the grant is a partnership with Durham Technical Community College. Duke has continued to emphasize and develop its partnerships with local institutions, most recently building on digital humanities partnership with North Carolina Central University [an HBCU]. We believe that the humanities are thriving and can be an integral part of a liberal arts education at community colleges as well. This partnership will enable Duke graduate students to work with faculty in more diverse environments and get valuable pedagogical experience. Such diversified training builds on the types of opportunities we are developing under another grant from the NEH called “Versatile Humanists at Duke.”

HW: I understand the grant will foster collaboration among faculty in a given department and also with faculty at other institutions. To what degree might it also encourage collaboration either across humanities departments and between the humanities and other disciplines?

GW: Faculty have been asking for more opportunities like the collaborative labs to be housed in the departments and engaged with the curriculum. They want the excitement and opportunities the labs provide. These labs and projects allow faculty to develop their interests organically.

Departments are not the vestiges of the humanities; they are the beating heart of the humanities. They are not equivalent to disciplinarity; Duke’s humanities departments are inherently interdisciplinary.This was clearly shown with the lab project we piloted in the English Department on Representing Migration. People were already interdisciplinary when they walked through the door and five faculty convenors approached the topic of migration from perspectives as diverse as linguistics and poetry to urban gentrification and refugee camps. The new embedded lab model facilitates the sharing of approaches among interdisciplinary colleagues all in the same department.

These labs will show, I believe, how the humanities also engage with digital domains and technology, computational media, and the pedagogical possibilities of gaming, for example. They will show how the humanities already think across domains, from music, art, linguistics, urbanism, history, and beyond. This was true in the pilot project. There are just so many ways that the humanities reach out and bridge fields.

HW: How do you see the grant fostering a greater understanding of the humanities among students and colleagues who focus on STEM or business fields?

GW: As I mentioned earlier, I think the humanities need to be considered outside the binary with STEM to highlight how they already intersect with other fields. Too often the humanities are considered in contrast to “practical fields.” But this grant will break down that false binary and demonstrate all the ways we are interdisciplinary and having impact. And most importantly, this grant will enable faculty to develop their interests organically out of what they already do.

The pilot English lab on migration, which also addresses questions of monuments and memory, was contacted by a colleague at the Duke Marine Lab. He is very interested in sea bed memorials, since now, with technology, we can map the ocean floor and start to visualize and memorialize slave routes differently.We can now reclaim the sea bed as a site of memory and begin to think about a memorial to the Middle Passage, for example. People are thinking about the ocean in an entirely different way, about how memory is imprinted, beyond the terrestrial roots of memory and history. So new true partnerships are being formed across the disciplines, allowing us to think in new ways.

Other dynamic examples that come to mind are the medical and health humanities, bio-ethics, environmental humanities; computational media and gaming are others.

HW: What might be the “butterfly effect” of the grant – its influence on ways the humanities have been perceived or practiced?

GW: It will disseminate Duke’s signature brand of interdisciplinary, project-based, dynamic humanities. The visiting faculty fellows will magnify the effects of Duke’s ideas onto their campuses, and we can also learn a great deal from them about the ways they apply these things in the classroom in innovative ways. The big effect is to make more visible what is already happening: humanists are already working in these dynamic, real-world areas, and students will be able to see more clearly how the humanities give our lives purpose. You can study the ways public policy, for example, affects people over time. These new initiatives will allow our community to come together organically: It’s more a model or a mechanism than a preconceived outcome. It makes visible how active the humanities are; they are in an active, rather than a passive sphere. It will also show how humanists create new knowledge with their fields of inquiry.

HW: If there is one central message that the humanities convey, what would it be, and how might the grant amplify that message?

GW: We can turn on its head what we think we know about what the humanities do. They are and do a broad range of things: they are not solo necessarily, not passive, not disengaged from real-world issues. They’re both historical and relevant to the present. The humanities are about purpose, not simply passion: I like to think of them as purposeful study, what makes your heart sing and also what impacts your world. This shows how the humanities are changing across the board, and not just with respect to contemporary issues. Whether it is mapping ancient sites with historical GIS or memorializing sea beds through new technology, the core is the humanistic lens and the kinds of questions we ask.

That is my hope: this will make more visible and draw more people to understand how dynamic and exciting humanistic work here is. Anything you wish to study you can study with a humanistic lens.The labs will show that we can bring students as freshmen into humanities research, not waiting until they are in their final year and working on a capstone project. Instead of promoting research in a final, cumulative, capstone event, this allows us to focus less on outcomes and more on process. The grant will provide students with hands-on research from the very beginning.

The ultimate contribution is that it will bring the process of inquiry to a student-centered experience earlier, so that they will be excited about the research process from the start.

We need to balance our need to have clear outcomes with the messiness of the process: the messiness is so important and valuable. We just need to think of assessing our results and success in different ways. If we push ourselves in new ways through selective interventions, we will discover new dimensions in the research process itself.

We are very pleased that Mellon has continued to support us in this endeavor.