In 2018 the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis proposed to the Mellon Foundation a series of initiatives aimed at Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE). The most ambitious of our plans was to pilot, sequentially, three studiolab communities (off-campus) that would prioritize interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement, while encouraging the development of final public-facing projects in any format — from performance and film to archive curation, exhibition, and print media. At the outset our goals were: 1) to develop the capacities, beyond specific disciplinary skills, essential to success within and beyond academia; 2) to nurture community among graduate students across disciplines and years; and 3) to blur the boundaries that structure graduate education, including between on-campus/off-campus. This presentation reflects on what we have learned to date (two years of pandemic notwithstanding) and shares some preliminary thoughts on transdisciplinary cohorts and the “dissertation” as proto-monograph.

Jean Allman is the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she directs the Center for the Humanities. Her research engages 20th-century African history, with thematic interests in gender, colonialism, decolonization, and the racial politics of knowledge production. She is the author of The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (Heinemann, 2000), with Victoria Tashjian; and Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (Indiana University Press, 2006), with John Parker, and she has edited several collections. Her work also appears in numerous academic journals. She has served on the boards of directors of the African Studies Association, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. She was the president of the African Studies Association in 2018.

Classics today confronts a world in which its history and the history of the worlds in which it was formed and which it contributed to shape are being called to account. But little of the conversation on this topic has focused on doctoral education, and yet this is the site where the discipline reproduces itself in a new generation. The question of reform requires a clear-sighted assessment of the most salient critiques of classics in contemporary discourse, and a much-needed conversation about its status as a discipline. Only on this basis can one propose reform fit to purpose.

Clifford Ando is David B. and Clara E. Stern Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Classics, History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of government, law, and religion in the Roman empire. The author or editor of 20 books, he is currently serving his second term as chair of Classics at the University of Chicago and is senior editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review. He has also served on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Graduate Education.

During a radical listening dialogue for the University of Washington’s Center for Communication Difference and Equity (CCDE) over 2021’s quarantine, Aliyah, a Black woman graduate student, tells her conversation partner, Danielle, that academia extracts her labor, struggles to hear her, and leaves her feeling disconnected. Danielle, also a Black woman graduate student, agrees, adding that she also struggles at times in her community, as her academic language can feel alienating to even those she loves. In my talk I will examine how radical listening, the process of listening for power (Kinchloe 2009; Joseph & Briscoe-Smith, 2021), can help us re-envision the Ph.D. — in the issues the students name, ranging from equitable labor to reciprocal knowledge exchange, to fostering community, to accessible scholarship — so that all graduate students can experience a wholeness of academic life in their own terms, where, in Danielle’s words, “our multiple identities [are] able to … come together and be true and be valued and be understood.”

Ralina L. Joseph is a scholar, teacher, and facilitator of race and communication. She is Presidential Term Professor of Communication, founding and acting director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity, and Associate Dean of Equity and Justice in Graduate Programs at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her B.A. in American civilization at Brown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of more than 20 articles and book chapters and three books, Generation Mixed Goes to School (Teachers College Press, 2021), with Allison Briscoe-Smith; Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (NYU Press, 2018); and Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2013). She is currently writing Interrupting Privilege: Talking Race and Fighting Racism, a book of essays based on her public scholarship.

This talk reviews the process by which Yale University instigated a reform of humanities doctoral education in 2020, a reform that continues to the present day. It underlines how the most intransigent subjects for reform are advising and teaching, both of which require relational reflection by a political and professional community unpracticed at such work.

Kathryn Lofton is Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Yale University where she also serves as the dean of humanities. Her books are Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California Press, 2011), Consuming Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and, with Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Women’s Work: An Anthology of African-American Women’s Historical Writings from Antebellum America to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2010).

This paper asks what would have to be done to make its title true. The list starts with admitting that the main humanities strategies — cooperating in downscaling and touting alt-ac careers — have failed to stabilize humanities programs or employment. It continues by noting that austerity and distraction from a necessary focus on academic employment have done joint damage to the educational pipeline for students of color in (another) moment of great urgency regarding racial justice. I’ll spend the bulk of my time arguing that graduate program health, racial justice, and humanities employment all hinge on new, confident, even militant articulations of humanities research missions and the infrastructural funding that they need to support these missions, which we will need to pursue collaboratively across all types of institutions, including research universities, regional state universities, HBCUs, tribal colleges, and community colleges.

Christopher Newfield joined the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) as its director of research in 2020 after 31 years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, most recently as Distinguished Professor of Literature and American Studies. He also serves as the president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2022. His work has focused on critical university studies, American literature since 1990, California culture and society, quantification studies, and the status of literary knowledge. He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980 (Duke University Press, 2003), Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008), and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). He blogs on higher education policy at Remaking the University.

In 2017, playwright Josefina Lopez and I opened the Boyle Heights Museum (BHM), dedicated to bringing local history to a predominantly Latino immigrant neighborhood. The BHM has opened four unique exhibitions over the past five years with a team of undergraduate and Ph.D. students who have worked collaboratively to research, write, and curate histories to be presented to a wider public in Boyle Heights. Their training has been critical to their own intellectual development as Latino/a public scholars. I have learned that this training in public history is vital to recruiting the next generation of historians and interdisciplinary scholars, while making their studies relevant to reaching new expansive notions of the public vital to the historical profession. This talk will reflect on these efforts, and place them in the context of the current needs in humanities education, civic engagement, and diversifying the U.S. historical narrative.

George J. Sánchez is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles (Oxford University Press, 1993) and the newly published Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (University of California Press, 2021). He has served as president of the American Studies Association, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and most recently the Organization of American Historians. He received the inaugural Equity Award from the American Historical Association in 2011 for an individual who has achieved excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into the historical profession. He was born in Boyle Heights to two immigrant parents from Mexico and is a first-generation college student, receiving his B.A. from Harvard College in 1981 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989.

zuri arman holds a B.A. in Africana studies and philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to being a graduate student, he is also a writer and poet with work that can be found in Collision Literary Magazine, Alluvia Magazine, Rock the Bells Hip-Hop Magazine, and a forthcoming anthology on queer abolitionist militance published by PM Press. He is currently interested in grappling with the residues of religious frameworks and grammars in contemporary culture and politics, radical Black political thought, and the relationship between Blackness, nature, and the human. His work is informed by his experience working in the environmental and environmental justice movements while completing his undergraduate degree. He’s the grandchild of Southern sharecroppers, which also informs his orientation to his work, which is nothing more than an attempt to figure out how to live in and with the ruins left by an anti-Black world.

Melaine Ferdinand-King is a thinker, scholar, and cultural practitioner from Brick, New Jersey. She received her B.A. from Spelman College, where she majored in sociology with concentrations in African diaspora and the world and women and gender studies. As a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies, her research currently explores Afro-surrealism, womanism, and the relationship between politics and culture in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. and Caribbean life. Through the Cogut Institute, she earned a Mellon fellowship in collaborative humanities as part of her commitment to developing alternative practices for interpersonal engagement in public, private, and professional spaces. She also serves as a graduate fellow of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. In addition to her graduate efforts, she works as a curator, archivist, and project manager. Her most recent practice includes co-curating the inaugural Black Biennial in Providence, RI.

Eleanor Rowe-Stefanik is an ABD Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. Her research focuses on mid-19th- to late 20th-century British and Anglophone literature and culture, with special interests in modernism, gender studies, transnationalism, and the postcolonial. Her dissertation project, “Ordinary Subjects: Being British, the Border, and the Bildungsroman,” defines a relationship between the novel of development, national subjectivity, and the legal and practical applications of the monolithic aesthetic and social “ordinary” at the turn of the century. Her work for the 21st-Century Ph.D. Mellon Proctorship focuses primarily on advocacy and conditions sensitivity for international students and scholars, and on developing a set of innovative and improved professionalization materials for Ph.D. students in the humanities.

Emily Simon is a doctoral student in the Department of English at Brown University. She focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American and Canadian poetics, and particularly its intersections with materialism, aesthetics, and the visual arts. Her dissertation project, “Essentially Shimmering: Contemporary Poetics at the Edges of Materialism,” considers various surface effects at the thresholds of conventional materialist categories and explores how poetry may be a form for configuring and experiencing these fleeting perceptual phenomena, suggesting new approaches for conceiving poetic materiality and change. She has also done editorial work for various publications including NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, differences, and Boston Review. Through the 21st-Century Ph.D. program, she has been specifically concerned with the question of what it means to get a Ph.D. in English in our current moment, and how doctoral programs can more realistically and capaciously conceive of their students’ futures, within and beyond the academy.