The Hum Lab: A Consortial Workshop

Sponsored by the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC); organized by Carleton, Grinnell, Haverford, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Smith Colleges

Liberal arts colleges focus extensively on faculty-student partnerships in intensive scholarly encounters.

Three major shifts–(1) in technology, (2) in non-disciplinary arts practices, and (3) in humanistic encounters across the curriculum and in the public sphere–offer rich opportunities for Humanities Centers of the Selective Liberal Arts Consortium (SLAC) to lead our institutions in new models of humanistic enterprise. One promising model is that of the Humanities Lab, which features faculty directors supervising teams of student collaborators. These labs might include faculty/students from various divisions who are interested in innovative humanistic approaches to liberal arts scholarship.

On February 28th–March 1st, 2014, Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities will host an Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC) workshop welcoming Humanities Center directors and key faculty partners from twelve AALAC institutions. Drawing on successful Humanities Lab initiatives at research institutions including Duke University, the various Centers and faculty will explore how liberal arts colleges might adapt these projects to their sizes and various missions. The Centers imagine versatile and vital small group lab endeavors that focus on praxis, creativity, research projects, and/or innovative digital building. A crucial component will be work that draws students, staff and faculty together in new configurations.

The keynote speaker for the workshop is Ian Baucom, Professor of English and Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. Baucom is also President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) International Advisory Board. Also joining us for the workshop are Matthew Battles (Principal and Associate Director) and Cristoforo Magliozzi (Project Coordinator) of Harvard metaLAB.

For more information, contact Laura McGrane, Associate Professor of English and Koshland Director, Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College: lmcgrane [at] haverford.edu

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Schedule Highlights

Friday, 28 February

Keynote address: Ian Baucom, Professor and Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University

Welcome: Daniel Weiss, Haverford President // Facilitator: Laura McGrane, Haverford College

Dinner and Facilitated Conversation:

• Matthew Battles, Principal and Associate Director, Harvard metaLAB
• Cristoforo Magliozzi, Project Coordinator, Harvard metaLAB
• Facilitator: Susannah Ottaway, Carleton College

Saturday, 1 March

Harvesting Ideas & Questions: Small Groups – Share ideas, challenges, and models

Small Group Facilitators:

• Rosetta Cohen, Smith
• Carol Dougherty, Wellesley
• Shuchi Kapila, Grinnell
• Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan

Directors Roundtable: Current Cross-Curricular Models

Lunch + Facilitated Conversations: (projects/challenges/facilities)

• Part I: Campus teams discuss models for home campuses
• Part II: Intercampus groups discuss cross-campus collaborations

Collaborations and Grant Opportunities

Small Group: Build out 3-5 Project Ideas // Large Group: Collaborative/Granting Models

Small Group Facilitators:

• Rosetta Cohen
• Carol Dougherty
• Shuchi Kapila
• Ethan Kleinberg

Next Steps

Facilitators:

• Susannah Ottaway
• Laura McGrane

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Participants

Carleton College

Susan Jaret McKinstry
Department of English
sjaret [at] carleton.edu

As a Victorianist, working at the intersection of literature, history, and visual studies, I am particularly engaged with exploring cross-disciplinary visual collaborations – such as physical and digital exhibitions – that connect faculty, students and staff, expand disciplinary boundaries, and reframe our research and teaching questions for digital tools.

Susannah Ottaway
David and Marian Adams Bryn-Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Humanities Center and Professor of History
sottaway [at] carleton.edu

As the Director of the Humanities Center at Carleton, I am very interested in exploring new models for collaborative student-faculty research. The Humanities Center already supports student research assistants in a variety of ways, and we promote faculty research and collaborative work, but we do not currently have a clear sense of how Humanities Labs could function at Carleton. While my research interests in eighteenth-century England mean that I am personally keen to explore the ways such models can function in historical and digital humanities contexts, I am also eager to understand how Carleton’s Humanities Center can facilitate team-based research more generally.

Lori Pearson
Department of Religion
lpearson [at] carleton.edu

As a scholar of modern religious thought, working at the intersection of Christian theology, social theory, and European philosophy, I am interested in collaborations among faculty and students from various fields that would explore innovative ways of engaging broad philosophical, historical, and ethical questions about justice, politics, power, and religion.

Denison University

Clare C. Jen
Department of Biology AND Women’s Studies Program
jenc [at] denison.edu

A “feminist makerlab” space uses feminist theories and methodologies to reconfigure STE(A)M projects. Its projects are collaborative across disciplines, prompted by socio-cultural necessities, and make material the product of its work. It is where “feminist makers” gain fluency in scientific inquiry and practice, socio-cultural literacies, and feminist thought and praxis.

Grinnell College

Shuchi Kapila
Department of English and Humanities Center
kapilas [at] grinnell.edu

a) As Director of Grinnell’s Humanities Center, I would like to facilitate initiatives bringing the Humanities Lab to Grinnell College. b) I would like to explore through the Humanities Lab ways to revitalize interdisciplinary postcolonial studies courses by promoting student engagement with cultures, histories, geographies, social and religious practices of vast populations in the Global South.

Joe Neisser 
Department of Philosophy and the Humanities Center
neisserj [at] grinnell.edu

Contemporary humanities scholarship requires multiple forms of literacy and tacit knowledge of how to navigate and engage digital spaces. So my interest is in learning to use multimodal media platforms in undergraduate pedagogy and collaborative research.

Erik Simpson
Department of English
simpsone [at] grinnell.edu

My interest in the workshop comes from two directions: as a developer of websites that feature student-created projects and as the co-chair of a committee planning spaces for the humanities social studies. I see humanities labs as an intersection of undergraduate pedagogy, interdisciplinary research, and institutional space planning.

Lesley Wright
Director, Faulconer Gallery and Lecturer, Department of Art and Art History
wrightl [at] grinnell.edu

I am looking to explore the museum as a physical and a virtual humanities lab site. Using exhibitions and collections to engage faculty and students with visual and physical materials, and expanding curatorial practice to the online realm where humanistic projects can exist over longer stretches of time are just the beginning.

Haverford College

Ken Koltun-Fromm
Department of Religion
kkoltunf [at] haverford.edu

The model of a Humanities Lab extends my own interests in expanding the Haverford classroom. I would like to explore more integrative possibilities of expansive learning, where I can team-teach a course with colleagues at other institutions, and create digital laboratories where students become active learners across multiple campuses.

Laura McGrane
Department of English
Koshland Director, John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities
lmcgrane [at] haverford.edu

As Koshland Director of the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities I am engaged in collaborative models of digital making and interdisciplinary arts projects. I also serve as faculty co-advisor for Re:Humanities (now in its fourth year), the first national undergraduate DH conference organized and hosted by students. For the Center and the English department, I hope to explore further the potential of drawing undergraduates and faculty together across liberal arts institutions in innovative and sustainable projects.

Bret Mulligan
Department of Classics
bmulliga [at] haverford.edu

I have three DH projects that are on-going or on the horizon: Classicizing Philadelphia (classicizingphiladelphia.blogs.brynmawr.edu/); 2) a digital commentary on Nepos’ Life of Hannibal (dcc.dickinson.edu/nepos-hannibal/); and 3) a plan to develop a gamified vocabulary tool for elementary and intermediate Latin.

Pomona College

Kevin J. H. Dettmar
Department of English
kevin.dettmar [at] pomona.edu

I’m interested to learn what kinds of things are being done to promote research in the humanities, and to create spaces in which faculty and students might participate together in the co-creation of new knowledge. Some conversations are beginning at my college about the possible creation of a humanities center.

Peter Kung
Department of Philosophy
peter.kung [at] pomona.edu

We at Pomona have started to rethink the undergraduate research experience in the humanities. The research model that most of us humanists had in graduate school—largely independent work, with (by scientists’ standards) minimal input from faculty—is unworkable in a liberal arts college. But neither does the model of having students work exclusively on our research seem desirable. How do we get undergraduates excited about and engaged in research in the humanities?

Richard McKirahan
Departments of Classics and of Philosophy and Program in Science, Technology and Society
rmckirahan [at] pomona.edu

Pomona along with the other Claremont Colleges are working to set up a Digital Humanities Center. I am the Pomona representative on the committee and I want to get ideas about how best to organize the center for our needs and about the kinds of activities and programs our center might support.

Reed College

Sonia Sabnis
Classics & Humanities
sabnis [at] reed.edu

I am interested in using the Lab model to sustain contact between different regional colleges, perhaps through interdisciplinary subjects outside the standard curriculum. Secondarily, what are the best goals of a Humanities lab, especially one that involves undergraduates, in terms of publications or other professional output? Can Humanities Lab models integrate community-based learning and creative projects?

Scripps College

Juliet Koss
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Art History
Director, Humanities Institute (beginning 1 July 2014)
jkoss [at] scrippscollege.edu

I’m especially interested in learning how to encourage faculty participation in, and how to build audiences for, interdisciplinary humanities events at a small liberal arts college with an overburdened faculty as well as how to develop programming that appeals to a range of audiences, including faculty, undergraduates, and the public.

Smith College

Rosetta Marantz Cohen
Sylvia D’Lugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies
Director of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute
Department of Education and Child Study
rcohen [at] smith.edu

As Director of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith, I am interested in exploring new ways to promote faculty/student collaboration, especially in the areas of material culture, museums, and the digital humanities. I’d like to support the development of programming that results in shared, interdisciplinary research in these areas.

Elisa Lanzi
Director, Digital Strategies and Services, Smith College Libraries
elanzi [at] smith.edu

I am in a newly created position in the college libraries that is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary; faculty, students, and information technology colleagues across campus and within the Five College consortium are my partners in various digital endeavors. My interest in the conference centers on the convergence of physical spaces and digital humanities in those contexts. Our library, which currently houses a humanities institute, is engaged in master planning for a renewed facility. Also, I am on the planning group for the “Design Media Lab” being built in our Visual Arts complex next summer. I would like to share stories and explore how such physical spaces can help us realize our pedagogical and scholarship goals.

Janie Vanpée
Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature
jvanpee [at] smith.edu

I’m involved in a number of projects at different stages that engage with digital technologies. I am most interested in discussing with other participants how best to lead a class to develop an online exhibit that presents the research and work of students in a public arena and in a format that others, including future classes or groups of students can continue to develop or expand the exhibition. I’ve used this approach to mount an exhibit on “Luxury objects and their use in era of Marie Antoinette”; to develop an entire course on an exhibit on the Myth of Marie Antoinette, and this past semester to guide students to write a collective mémoire of the German occupation of Paris, 1939-1944, from the perspectives of 15 different characters.

I’m also helping a group of students develop and launch an online journal, Global Impressions, that will feature student reflections on intercultural and interlinguistic experiences and insights. We are using the journal as a model for teaching students about digital publication and issues of copyright, open access, digital collaboration.

Swarthmore College

Timothy Burke
Department of History
tburke1 [at] swarthmore.edu“>tburke1 [at] swarthmore.edu

As a member of the e executive committee of a new, somewhat embryonic institute at Swarthmore that has been charged with cultivating the practice of liberal arts teaching and scholarship at the college and beyond, I’m very interested in the workshop across the breadth of its envisioned topics. I’m particularly keen to learn from the experiences of other faculty in building centers and institutes and to explore how to extend the activities of a center or institute beyond its home campus—a charge that is part of our institute’s mission which we have yet to fully envision.

Wellesley College

Diego Arciniegas
Theatre Studies
darcinie [at] wellesley.edu

Diego Arciniegas is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Wellesley College, where he teaches Rhetoric and classical and contemporary performance.  Diego served as the Artistic Director of the Publick Theatre Boston from 2001 to 2011, and currently serves on the Advisory Committee to the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley.  His interest in Humanities Labs centers around “Arts, curation, digital, and traditional collaborative projects”.

Bryan Burns
Classical Studies
bburns [at] wellesley.edu

I am a classical archaeologist interested in new methods of data management and presentation, and better modes of teaching with visual material. I have recently worked with students to design exhibits in Omeka and am now beginning a project to make a collection of artifacts accessible through Shared Shelf.

Carol Dougherty
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classical Studies
Director, Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for Humanities
cdougherty [at] wellesley.edu

As the Director of the Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College, I am interested in learning more about the potential for Humanities Labs to generate a lively and engaged humanities community at the undergraduate level: facilitating faculty and student/faculty collaboration, highlighting the practiced and performative aspects of the humanities, bringing new resources to the college campus.

Wesleyan University

Katherine Brewer Ball
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities
kbrewerball [at] wesleyan.edu

I am primarily interested in using the digital humanities to teach at the intersection of performance studies and media studies, between the “live” and the “mediated.” I am also currently developing a digital archive project that focuses on the documentation and archivization of contemporary queer and feminist performance art and dance.

Ethan Kleinberg
Professor of History and Letters; Executive Editor of History and Theory
Director of Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities
ekleinberg [at] wesleyan.edu

Kleinberg’s wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of history, critical theory, philosophy, comparative literature and religion. He is the author of Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-61, which was awarded the 2006 Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best book in intellectual history, by the Journal of the History of Ideas. His co-edited volume Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory of the Twenty-First Century was just published by Cornell University Press. Kleinberg is presently in the process of completing two book length monographs: The Myth of Emmanuel Levinas on the Talmudic Lectures the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas presented in Paris between 1960 and 1990, and Haunting History about deconstruction and the writing of history. In his capacity as Director of the Center he has designed a small media lab and is working to implement courses and collaborations in the digital humanities and new media studies.

David Gary Shaw
Department of History
gshaw [at] wesleyan.edu

I am currently directing Wesleyan’s Digital and Computational Knowledge Initiative, something I started doing as dean of the social sciences last year. One of the key pieces is introducing faculty to the concepts and skills needed to enrich their own research and teaching with digital humanities abilities. To this end, we’ve organized workshops and talks, I’ve traveled to see what’s being done elsewhere, and we’ve launched courses to bring these skills to students. There are about five courses underway this year and we hope to add six or so new courses next year.

Photos by Lisa Boughter from The Hum Lab: A Consortial Workshop, hosted by Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, February 28th–March 1st, 2014.