Advancing Humanities Research
Each year, the Humanities Center runs programs to help faculty develop their scholarship, publish it, and explain its value to society. The center's workshops address topics such as communicating with public audiences, developing grant proposals, new digital methods, and publishing. We also host events such as New Books at Miami, where faculty authors can present new work to the community.
In 2022-2023, the center will again offer its popular Writing for the Public Workshop. Click this link for more information on the program and how to apply.
Among the most popular Humanities Center programs, the Book Proposal Workshop began in 2014. Seventeen faculty members in three divisions collaborated in a workshop run by Drew Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History, and later received individual consultations with Robert Lockhart, Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2016, twelve faculty members worked with Mary Jean Corbett, Distinguished Professor of English, and later met with Peter J. Potter, Editor-in-Chief of Cornell University Press. In 2017, a special workshop for junior scholars, "From Dissertation to Book," was chaired by Steven Conn, W. E. Smith Professor of History, and featured a visit by Nancy Toff of Oxford University Press. Subsequent workshops have been chaired by Elaine Miller, Professor of Philosophy, and Jonathan Strauss, Professor of French, and have concluded with visits by Courtney Berger of Duke University Press and Tom Lay of Fordham University Press. In 2021-22, the Book Proposal Workshop was led by art history professor Andrew Casper and concluded with a visit by Douglas Armato, Director of the University of Minnesota Press. Participants in this program receive $250 in research funding and a one-on-one consultation with a visiting editor.
Please consult the Faculty Opportunities page to for information about when this program is running and application deadlines.
This program helps faculty members communicate their work to non-scholarly audiences. The workshop includes practical exercises, information on pitching and crafting articles and book manuscripts, and collaborative discussion of participant writing. Participants leave the workshop with a short article ready for submission or a major proposal ready to pitch.
In 2022-2023, the program will allow up to 16 faculty members t receive a two-day virtual workshop offered by the nationally-recognized Op-Ed Project. Participants will then hone their work in a workshop coordinated by Professor Kimberly Hamlin in early March. Faculty who complete the program will receive $250 in professional expenses.
Click the Writing for the Public Workshop link for more information on the program and how to apply.
Writing for the Public was first offered in 2016 by Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University, and frequent public commentator on medical humanities issues. Ten Miami University faculty members worked with Wald on op-ed pieces and then attended her lecture, "Cell Lines to Bioslaves: Biotechnology and the Politics of Health."
In 2020, the workshop was led by Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University of New Orleans and author of numerous books. Schaberg is founding co-editor of Object Lessons--a series of books about objects such as bread, refrigerators, neckties, and sewing needles--and the leader of a national series of NEH Institutes on public writing.
To date, the 10 faculty members who took the 2020 workshop have published over a dozen articles in outlets including The Conversation, Popula, Quartz, and The Washington Post.
The Humanities Center Grant Development Workshops aim to increase external funding for individual and collaborative faculty projects.
The inaugural workshop was coordinated in January 2021 by Mary Jean Corbett, Distinguished Professor of English. Fourteen faculty members participated, including two collaborative project teams. They met for two intense days of proposal review. Each received $250 in research funding and a proposal review from Fred Winter, Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Teams developing collaborative applications also received up to $2,000 to plan on-campus events related to their research proposal.
The 2021 Grant Development Workshop also included an intial information session explaining university policies related to humanities grants and a talk by the NEH's Fred Winter on how to identify and secure significant external funding to support humanities research.
Please consult the Faculty Opportunities page to for information about when this program is running and application deadlines.
The digital methods workshop allows humanities scholars to explore new ways of studying, visualizing, and analyzing human experience. The 2016 workshop took place in Miami's Geographic Information Science laboratory, where faculty members worked on ways of mapping complex historical and cultural data sets. Participants have used mapping technology in subsequent research and digital humanities projects.
Please consult the Faculty Opportunities page to for information about when this program is running and application deadlines.
