Faculty Summer Stipends for Curricular Innovation

About

This program grants graduate faculty members summer stipends so that they can design new graduate courses with significant public and/or digital humanities scholarship components. 

2023 Awardees

This summer, Patrick McKelvey, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, worked on designing a new graduate seminar with support from Humanities Engage called Critical Disability Studies. This will examine canonical and emergent lines of Black, trans, and queer analysis within the field of disability studies while also foregrounding access as an ethic, episteme, and method. Patrick looks forward to seeing how he might import the success of Critical Disability Studies to future courses.

Curricular Design Experience: Access and/as Public Scholarship

2022 Awardees

With the goal of creating a popular history of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that is both scholarly and entertaining, Kathy George, Professor of Theatre Arts, will develop a seminar in which students collaborate to create an edited manuscript that covers some 350 years of Shakespeare productions and which allows for podcasts and public appearances.


Amy WilliamsIn collaboration with members of the Staycee Pearl Dance Project and with input from other faculty, Associate Professor of Music Amy Williams will develop the course “Interdisciplinary Performance Laboratory.” This course will provide graduate students with valuable perspectives into cross-disciplinary creative processes and culminate in a public performance of new multi-disciplinary works, organized around a relevant social issue.

 

2021 Awardees

Run in collaboration with Sharing Our Story, Assistant Professor of Music Shalini R. Ayyagaris course “Transmedia and Sounding Publics: Refugee Stories in Pittsburgh” will involve developing multimedia skills, conducting ethnographic research, working with local non-profit organizations, and collaborating with refugee communities in Pittsburgh.


Associate Professor of Communication Caitlin Bruce will foreground alternative forms of scholarly production, such as websites, podcasts, and blog posts; site visits; and partnerships with community organizations in her course, “Rhetoric of Space and Place in Western PA: Generating Scholarship with Place.”


In Associate Professor of History Laura Lovett’s “The Public-Facing History Laboratory” course, students will engage with public partners, such as museums, libraries, archives, historical societies, and other local organizations, to create experimental and collaborative historical products and tools for the public.

 

2020 Awardees

Raja AdalFor “Digital and Critical Approaches to Asian History,” Raja Adal, Assistant Professor of History, updated an introductory graduate seminar focusing on Asian history to include working with datasets, data analysis and visualization and culminating in a substantial blogpost for an educated general audience.


Elizabeth PittsElizabeth Pitts, Assistant Professor of English, created the course “Public Communication of Science and Technology” in conjunction with an exhibit she organized called Art's Work in the Age of Biotechnology. She aims with these projects to facilitate greater public participation in the shaping of emerging technologies.


Annette VeeAssociate Professor of English Annette Vee developed the course “Automated Writing from Amanuenses to AI” as a historical and technical exploration of why people have developed automated writing systems (AWS), what challenges AWS offer, and how to implement AWS using natural language processing and public data sets.