Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Seminars

In summer 2010 the Humanities Research Center received a quarter-million dollar grant to support four additional years of this program.
 
These two-semester seminars promote research collaboration at the highest level between faculty and doctoral students. Starting with a core of well-developed research, the seminars invite students from across the humanities to become fellow researchers and collaborators. The seminars support innovative graduate level training and research in the humanities and social sciences. 

The seminars provide graduate students an opportunity for a $2000 stipend, competitive summer funding, and conference travel funding. To date, the Center has offered fifteen Mellon Graduate Research Seminars. 

Faculty Seminar Leader Guidelines  

2012-13 Seminars 

Before and After Queer: Sexualities in Theory, History, and Performance

Faculty leaders: Joseph Campana, assistant professor of English, and Judith Roof, William Shakespeare Chair in English

Student participants: Alanna Beroiza (English), John Ellis-Etchison (English), Julie Knutson (art history), Benjamin Kozicki (English), Marcel LaFlamme (anthropology), Minji Lee (religious studies), Ian Lowrie (anthropology), and Seth Morton (English).

"Before and After Queer” attempts to rethink the methods, assumptions, and theories deployed to address issues of sexuality since the dominance of the category “queer.” This seminar will consider how histories, theories, and performance practices that exist before, after, and even alongside the historical moment of "queer" incite innovative ways of thinking about sexuality. Deploying these side-lined theories and questions about history, subjectivity, style, desire, and expression enable a new interrogation of sexuality and open up new venues for exploration. 

Frames of the Beautiful, the Criminal, and the Mad: The Art and the Science of Excess

Faculty leader: Deborah Harter, associate professor of French studies

Student participants: Sarah Seewoester Cain (linguistics), Linda Ceriello (religious studies), Kristen Ray (English), Nathaniel Vlachos (anthropology), and Rachel Schneider Vlachos (religious studies).

Reflecting on representations of the "excessive" in science and in art of the modern period - madness, genius, criminal, eccentric, beautiful, and pathological - this seminar welcomes students from all fields in the humanities and social sciences. We will consider the aesthetic with scientific, the ethical with the historical, and play havoc with all usual boundaries of disciplines, period, and genre.

2011-12 Seminar

Mapping Death: Religious Preparations for Afterlife Journeys (Writing Workshop)
Faculty Leader: April D. DeConick, Isla Carroll & Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies  

Student participants: Grant Adamson (religious studies), Matt Dillon (religious studies), Michael Domeracki (religious studies), Franklin Trammell (religious studies), and Adriana Umana (French studies).

The Mapping Death seminar was so successful in 2010-11, the faculty leader and students opted to extend the seminar for another year through an intensive writing workshop. The course sought to cross-culturally map death journeys and religious preparations for them in order to investigate the relationship between the anticipated afterlife journey and the group’s metaphysics and praxis. The participants will be engaged in the creation and cultivation of a rich interdisciplinary approach to the comparative study of traditions, a ‘new’ history-of-traditions approach that is conscious of the historical contexture of traditions, their referentiality, communal generation and conveyance, responsiveness, changeability, accumulative nature, and variability in transmission.

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Click here to see a list of past Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Seminars