Past Initiatives (Research)

A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this interdisciplinary program provided two-year postdoctoral fellowships for recent PhD recipients in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

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Sawyer Seminar on Interrogating the Plantationocene

In 2019 and 2020, this seminar examined the past and present of plantations, their materialities, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries.

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Faculty Development Seminars

From 2007 to 2018, the Faculty Development Seminars in the Humanities program enhanced the quality of humanities research at UW-Madison and promoted sustained collaboration and dialogue across disciplinary lines.

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Sawyer Seminar on Biopolitics

From 2011-13, the Center’s Sawyer Seminar–”Biopolitics: Life in Past and Present”–examined the limitations and promise of biopolitics as an interpretive framework, integrating the contributions of philosophers, anthropologists, literary critics, historians, sociologists, and biological scientists.

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Emancipations

Through exciting public talks, scholarly symposia and workshops, off-campus events with partner institutions, and thoughtful programs related to undergraduate coursework, the In 2012-13 project Emancipations, hosted by the Center for the Humanities, launched important conversations about how slavery, its destruction, and its aftermath have shaped the modern world.

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What is Human?

The What Is Human? initiative fostered revitalization of intellectual and institutional relationships between the sciences and the humanities. Aiming to break down what C.P. Snow called a “Two Cultures” division between the humanities and the sciences, WIH created a new interdisciplinary learning community and public intellectual dynamic. WIH fostered collaborative research partnerships across the disciplines and explored collaborative scientific and humanistic strategies and resources for funding and project development.

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Computational Humanities Lab

By applying techniques widely used across the sciences, such as data analysis, computational modeling, network mapping, and more, humanists are discovering unexpected connections and intriguing patterns in music, visual art, literature, and historical works, opening up new realms for analysis, criticism, and understanding.

Through lecture series, summer institutes, workshops, and hackathons, the Center for the Humanities joined other digital initiatives on campus in exploring the computational humanities. This lab investigated how advanced computational techniques and approaches can augment the close analysis provided by more traditional humanities scholarship. Our Computational Humanities Lab offered skills and software training, discussions and workshops, and provided a venue for presenting cutting edge computational scholarship in the humanities.

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