Humanities Without Walls

Humanities Without Walls (HWW) at Marquette is a collaborative grant project supported by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. HWW connects the humanities centers at 16 Midwest universities across the region and their work has been funded by over $12 million in grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since its formation in 2014. The work of HWW at Marquette brings together an interdisciplinary humanities team dedicated to researching and implementing innovative career diversity programs assisting humanities graduate students with their futures both within and beyond the academy. Working in collaboration with HWW at the University of Illinois, the $1.3 grant awarded to Marquette will support the design, construction and implementation of HWW’s Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Fellowship Workshop. Each summer, the workshop will fund twenty fellowships for Ph.D. students in the humanities working on degrees at universities across the United States who will come together to discern values, think through their potential careers and build community with one another as they plan for their lives beyond graduate school.

Marquette University becomes the first new consortium partner invited into the HWW consortium since 2014 and now joins the other 15 HWW university partners including the University of Chicago, Notre Dame University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a member, Marquette humanities faculty will be able to propose projects for HWW’s Grand Research Challenge grants. These $150,000 grants will support interdisciplinary, community based, humanities research projects tasked with thinking through some of society’s most pressing issues while proposing solutions rooted in humanities methodologies. The work of HWW at Marquette brings together humanities faculty, graduate students, the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School as we plan for the future of humanities training at Marquette, in the Midwest and the world.