The Humanities Centers Consortium tracks its roots to 1998, when Chris Zacher founded the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, later renamed to the Humanities Collaboratory. Built on the principles of collaborative research, interdisciplinarity, and innovation, the collaboratory naturally formed relationships many other active centers within the humanities.
In Autumn of 2021, the Humanities Centers Consortium was established to provide an organizational home to the collaboratory and five other peer centers (below). The goals of the consortium are to support our centers, amplify opportunities for collaboration among them, and make efficient use of our resources in order to best serve our communities, on campus and beyond.
- The Center for Ethnic Studies (which brings together Asian-American Studies, Latina/o Studies and American Indian Studies)
- Center for Folklore Studies
- Center for the Study of Religion
- Melton Center for Jewish Studies
- Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Humanities Collaboratory
The collaboratory serves as an incubator for new collaborative modes of scholarship, teaching and engagement. Among its activities, the collaboratory curates programming designed to spark new conversations and visions for the future of the humanities, and it actively explores new models of career diversity for humanities PhD’s. While maintaining roots in the long-standing disciplines and departments, the collaboratory works to facilitate the formation of new constellations of humanities faculty and students — in working groups, initiatives and centers — all designed to create new knowledge through collaboration with communities on and beyond campus.