Borghesi-Mellon Workshops
Since 2000, the Center's Workshops in the Humanities have provided an opportunity for students and faculty to work together outside of the classroom, in working groups centered on an interdisciplinary topic, broadly conceived, drawn from any period, field, or method of research in the humanities.
One of the Center’s most exciting programs, the Workshops have led to conferences, books, teaching innovations, and the creation of long-term research centers and projects. Recent and current workshops have focused on Comics, Disability Studies and Activism, Food Studies, Digital Humanities, and Critical University Studies.
From 2000 to 2015, the A. W. Mellon Foundation generously funded over 50 distinct “Mellon Workshops" through multiyear grants. In 2014, the Mellon Foundation matched an endowment gift from UW-Madison alumni Nancy Borghesi (B.A.’69, Economics, and a member of the College of Letters & Science Board of Visitors) and David Borghesi (BBA’70, Accounting), acknowledging the leadership and dedication of the Center for Humanities Director, Professor Sara Guyer. Beginning in 2015 this longstanding program was renamed the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops in the Humanities.
Applied Comics Kitchen aims to create an open, practice-based dialogue for educators and researchers from any discipline.
This workshop attempts to map the historic and future praxis of technological adaptation in the Black diaspora, including the spiritual, material, and cultural tactics of resilience and self-determination informed by such modes as Afro-Futurism and Afro-Optimism.
This workshop brings together faculty, staff and graduate students whose research and teaching involves food. In wide-ranging conversations, we’ll think about aesthetics and ethics, marketing and technology, hunger and excess, anorexia and obesity, cooking and eating, justice and regulation, nutrition and safety.
This workshop aims to develop a working campus community dedicated to the critical, historical, and ethnographic analysis of sound and global musical traditions.
This project facilitates interdisciplinary exchange and
collaboration centered on new approaches to the study of pre-modern inscriptions.
This workshop encourages a cross-disciplinary exploration of science, nature, and wonder within a global context, to challenge modern understandings of science by investigating new approaches to the medieval conception of scientia, or “knowledge.”
How do we think of space not as a container but a conductor of relations? How do we think of space not merely as a form of relations but also as a method that forms relations?
This artist-led workshop and event series will illuminate intersections between art, the humanities, and environmental studies, showcasing a range of expressions that explore the relationships between humans and the world they inhabit in this era of ecological complexity.
Focusing particularly on Nordic-American cultures, this workshop explores the long-term effects of migration experiences more generally in generations that follow the initial migration, and the potentials of collaborative, participatory research that seeks to understand and document such legacies.
Propose a Borghesi-Mellon Workshop
Support from Nancy and David Borghesi and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allows the Center for the Humanities to support 3-5 new interdisciplinary workshops in the humanities each year.
Upcoming Events and Workshops
Elizabeth Freeman
Professor of English, University of California Davis