Dietrich School Receives NEH Grant to Rethink Humanities Doctoral Education
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a nearly $25,000 grant to Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, Holger Hoock, the J. Carroll Amundson Professor of British History, to support his project, “Humanities Careers: Re-Imagining Doctoral Education in the Humanities.” The grant will be matched by funding from the Dietrich School.
As part of this initiative, Hoock, who oversees master’s and doctoral programs in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences, will engage graduate faculty and students across fourteen Humanities and arts disciplines in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, as well as administrators, alumni, community, and industry partners, in a planning process to rethink humanities doctoral education to optimize every student’s preparation for diverse high-impact careers.
Embracing multiple definitions of student and program success, Hoock and his team will focus on student and alumni data; curricular change; partnerships across and beyond campus, including alumni relations; and experiential learning. Their effort will thus foster a cultural transformation in how faculty, students, and the University envisage the broader importance of Humanities PhDs and the societal impacts of humanistic training.
Studying current culture and resources across programs, and investigating best practices nationally, the project team will create an initial suite of new resources and make actionable recommendations to the University, the Dietrich School, and doctoral programs.
Says Hoock, “We will explore how a doctoral-level education in the Humanities can optimally combine rigorous disciplinary and scholarly training with strategies to enhance students’ ability to articulate and demonstrate the relevance of their skills for diverse professional settings, and develop competencies currently underdeveloped in doctoral training but relevant in the academy, government, industry, and the non-profit world alike. Diversified training will prepare the next generation of scholar-teacher-leaders to make vivid academia’s relevance to, and nimbleness in addressing, the world beyond its walls.”