Projects & Programs

The HRC is committed to creating productive liaisons with a diverse range of national and local groups, including foundations, centers, research institutions and universities, and the Houston community. Please follow the links at the left to learn more about these recent and ongoing initiatives.

Emerging Disciplines

The HRC hosted the first Emerging Disciplines symposium at Rice in September 2009, featuring prominent scholars from across academic disciplines who are shaping important new fields of scholarly inquiry. Participants discussed the research questions that have served as the impetus for their new approaches, the methodological strategies that their emerging field entails, intellectual opportunities and challenges requisite to the emerging field, graduate student engagement, strategies for sustaining new research models, and other related issues. The speakers represent a broad range of interdisciplinary fields, including music and the mind, neurohistory, deep history, cultural economy, cognitive approaches to art history, digital humanities, and new approaches to Americas studies.

Houston Enriches Rice Education

The HERE Project advances Rice University's relationship to the larger Houston community and enhances faculty research and both undergraduate and graduate education. HERE aims to work within President Leebron's A Vision for Rice University's Second Century, which states, "We must fully engage with the city of Houston — learning from it and contributing to it — as a successful partnership with our home city is an essential part of our future."

Medicine and the Humanities

The HRC hosts this forum to address the role and impact of the humanities in pre-med education at Rice University. Participants include undergraduate students entering medical school, who have demonstrated excellence in both the sciences and humanities, and faculty members who have served as advisors in discussions about the possible Rice-Baylor College of Medicine merger, or have been otherwise engaged in medical humanities programming.

Our Americas Archive Partnership

OAAP is an innovative digital humanities project with a view to supporting scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. Scholars, librarians and technologists are collaborating to develop an integrated approach to discovering, accessing and using scholarly works that exist in multiple digital repositories in order to facilitate new forms of research and make accessible new objects of study.

Public Humanities Initiative

This program for Houston-area high schools brings faculty from the School of Humanities at Rice to high school classrooms to present new scholarship in their fields and to provide an introduction to college-level topics and approaches.  High school teachers are encouraged to identify a speaker and topic that would suit their classrooms.  Topics include literary analysis, American history, religious studies, media studies, and linguistics.  To request a professor to visit your classroom, please contact the Office of K-12 Initiatives at Rice.