How to Stop Giving Graduate Students Bad Advice

The application period has closed. Thanks to all who applied!

Friday, May 17, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Gerber Lounge, EPB (Room 304)

A Humanities for the Public Good Workshop with Bruce Burgett, Professor and Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, and Miriam Bartha, Director of Graduate Programs and Strategic Initiatives of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.

About:

This interactive workshop asks formal and informal mentors of graduate students in the humanities and across the humanistic disciplines to take stock of the short and long term impact of the advice offered by departments, faculty members, and others. How would mentoring change if we started with the premise that “being a professor” was only one — and an increasingly less likely — reason to undertake advanced studies in the humanities? If we thought of mentoring as a shared responsibility for faculty, staff, fellow students, alumni, and potential community partners or employers? After generating ideas about what good mentoring is not, we’ll explore alternatives, including resources, models, and the promise of public scholarship and other experiential pedagogies that help students find meaning, commitment, and purpose on the path through their graduate studies.

Outcomes:

This interactive workshop asks formal and informal mentors of graduate students in the humanities and across the humanistic to take stock of the short and long term impact of the advice offered by departments, faculty members, and others. How would mentoring change if we started with the premise that “being a professor” was only one — and an increasingly less likely — reason to undertake advanced studies in the humanities? If we thought of mentoring as a shared responsibility for faculty, staff, fellow students, alumni, and potential community partners or employers? After generating ideas about what good mentoring is not, we’ll explore alternatives, including resources, models, and the promise of public scholarship and other experiential pedagogies that help students find meaning, commitment, and purpose on the path through their graduate studies.

Apply:

Application deadline: Tuesday, April 30, 5:00 p.m.

Faculty, staff, and graduate students who mentor and support graduate students, directly and indirectly, may apply to participate. We have a limited number of spaces available. Participants will receive $200.

Please use this form to tell us why you would like to be included. We also request an email from your DEO (faculty), DGS (graduate student), or supervisor (staff), supporting your application. It should be sent to obermann-center@uiowa.edu. (This can be a simple email that says: “I support the application from X to participate in the Humanities for the Public Good summer workshop on mentoring.”)

Workshop Leaders:

Bruce Burgett is Professor and Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He also holds an appointment in the English Department at the University of Washington Seattle. He also works with UW graduate students through two ongoing projects designed to promote interdisciplinarity and community-engaged research and teaching: IAS’s Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy and the Simpson Center for the Humanities’ graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship, which he co-directs. His research focuses on American studies, cultural studies, queer studies, critical race studies, and interdisciplinary and public scholarship. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton UP) and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies(NYU Press) and the interactive website Keywords for American Cultural Studies. He is Past President of the Cultural Studies Association, past Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, and a former member of the Board of Trustees of Humanities Washington. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the University of Washington Press.

Miriam Bartha is the Director of Graduate Programs and Strategic Initiatives of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. She has worked as a scholar, arts administrator for PEN American Center, and associate director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington Seattle. She is a national leader in training graduate students to work as publicly engaged scholars. Among her publications, an article co-authored with Bruce Burgett is especially relevant to the workshop: “Why Public Scholarship Matters for Graduate Education,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 15:1 (January 2015): 31-43. Her essay “Keyword: Skill” in the Keywords for American Cultural Studies project is also cited widely. Her current work asks how we can expand and diversify professional development opportunities and pathways for publicly engaged scholars, an emphasis of UW’s graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship, which she helped to create.