The Center for the Humanities has received a $125,000 grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation in support of Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities.
The grant will allow the center to continue to fund at least five workshops a year through Spring 2015.
Workshops center on a broadly conceived theme, and are designed and led by UW-Madison faculty, students and/or academic staff.
To date, the Mellon Workshops have involved over 2,000 faculty and students from sixty-six departments or campus units. The workshops have sponsored over 200 guest lectures (i.e., more than twenty each year), over 370 seminar meetings, and nearly twenty conferences.
Topics of the six 2009-10 workshops are:
- Science and Print Culture, led by Florence Hsia (History of Science)
- African Diaspora, Genetics and Genealogy, led by Teju Olaniyan (English and African Languages and Literatures) and Tracy Curtis (Afro-American Studies)
- Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism: Understanding Sense Perception and Experience Before and in the Wake of the Virtual and the Digital, led by Jill Casid (Art History)
- Corpus: Premodern Books and Bodies, led by Lisa Cooper (English) and Kellie Robertson (English)
- Athens and Jerusalem, led by Len Kaplan (Law) and Rudy Koshar (History)
The Center will invite applications for new workshops in Spring 2010.