What is the role of humanities centers and institutes, and what can they do to spark change in graduate education? In this episode, we speak with our mentors, Dr. Barbara Mennel (UF CHPS) and Dr. Kelly Anne Brown (UCHRI), in a wide-ranging conversation about how humanities centers and institutes function as an incubator for intellectual and professional networks, hubs for experimental programming, and safe spaces for grad students. We discuss how underfunding the humanities might lead to a host of issues downstream, including space for cutting-edge scholarship. We also speak about distributed models of mentorship and how they can prepare students for multiple career paths.

Given the crisis of declining student enrollments and tenure-track jobs, what is the role of scholarly organizations in facilitating systemic change? This episode, we speak with Dr. Joy Connolly about her role as president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works on fellowship design, change acceleration, and creating spaces for students, faculty, and administrators to craft a more sustainable future for the humanities.

How do we create spaces of care for one another in structures that make us unwell? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mimi Khuc, a writer, scholar, mental health advocate, and adjunct lecturer in disability studies at Georgetown University. We cover her advocacy for adjunct professors, mental health issues students face in grad school, the silencing of emotions in professional settings, and changing one’s career trajectory during the PhD. Contact us at [email protected].

The digital wave is sweeping the humanities, raising provocative new questions: Should podcasting count as a form of scholarship, and can the dissertation be something other than a book-length monograph? In this episode, we visit the National Humanities Center’s virtual podcasting institute in 2020, where Lauren, June, Mirna, and Kevin met and collaborated on a podcast about digital intimacies during the pandemic lockdown. We caught up with them one year later. We also spoke with Andy Mink, Vice President of Education Programs at the National Humanities Center, about NHC’s programming for graduate students and the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations. Bonus: a meditative ASMR for graduate students.

Contact us at [email protected].

We need to talk about work, and what’s not working, in graduate school. Graduate students are instructors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and researchers, but our stipends are often not enough to make ends meet. First, we look back at the Columbia University graduate student strikes with Sourav Chatterjee, a PhD student at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies program at Columbia. Then we chat with Dr. Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Graduate Feminist Director at UC Santa Cruz, about the jobs crisis, academic labor as labor, the UCSC graduate strike, and what can and needs to change around working conditions in the academy. Contact us at [email protected].

Under Review is a podcast hosted by June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox, two PhD students who ask questions about humanities graduate education. In the first episode, we spoke with Dr. Rachel Arteaga, Assistant Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and co-author of ‘We All Have Levers We Can Pull’: Reforming Graduate Education.” We spoke about what we can learn from community colleges, the “prestige economy” of higher ed, resistance to alt-ac career paths, and what can be done to reform graduate education today. Find further episode resources here, and contact us at [email protected].  

An introduction to Under Review: Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education.