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Humanities Engage Summer Workshop Program 2023

A note for attendees: we strongly recommend bringing a laptop to this event, as we will be working on projects in real time. If you don't currently have access to a laptop, you can borrow one at Hillman.

Some notes and links from the workshop - Pitt's Community Engagement & Outreach Map: http://engagementmap.pitt.edu/

Welcome, Overview, and Objectives

Land Acknowledgement 

Schedule Details

Wednesday, May 10

William Pitt Union Dining Room A

8:30 am – 9:30 am: Breakfast and Welcome

9:30 am - 12:00 pm: Session 1 // Public-Facing Humanities

12:00 pm: Lunch

1:00 pm - 3:30 pm: Session 2 // Versatile Skillsets

4:00 pm: Reception

Thursday, May 11

William Pitt Union Dining Room A

8:30 am Breakfast

9:00 am - 12:00 pm: Session 3 // Humanities Unbound

12:00 pm: Lunch

1:00 pm - 3:30 pm: Wrap-up Session

Welcome!

Humanities Engage fosters a culture change in how arts and humanities departments, faculty, and doctoral students in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences envisage the broader importance of humanities Ph.D.s and the societal impact of humanistic training. This project was developed with generous support from the Mellon Foundation. 

To make the full spectrum of postdoctoral humanistic careers visible, valued, and viable, we are committed to  

  • understanding Ph.D. students’ career objectives and the actual career outcomes of doctoral alumni 
  • supporting all doctoral students as they continuously evaluate their educational and professional goals, skills, and needs, and pursue flexible pathways toward timely completion of degrees 
  • emphasizing the overlaps between superb preparation for humanists’ careers within and beyond academia 
  • improving the quality of postdoctoral outcomes across sectors as well as increasing completion rates of diverse cohorts. 

As we train the next generation of scholar-teacher-leaders within and beyond the classroom and academy, we seek to make the humanities more fully integral to tackling the complex challenges facing an interconnected yet divided world. 

Funding through this Mellon grant supports the design and implementation of discipline-based and interdisciplinary curricular changes across humanities doctoral programs, an ambitious immersive fellowship program across non-profit, public, and corporate sectors, and modernizing the culture of doctoral advising and mentoring.

The 2023 Summer Workshop is designed to promote the primary functions of Humanities Engage: the advancement of the public-facing humanities, curricular innovation, and cultivating versatile skillsets for doctoral students. 

Humanities Engage has identified the following target outcomes for this workshop.

Doctoral students will complete this workshop with one or more of the following:

Faculty will complete this workshop with one or more of the following:

Land Acknowledgement

We recognize that the University of Pittsburgh occupies the ancestral land of the Adena culture, Hopewell culture, and Monongahela peoples, who were later joined by refugees of other tribes (including the Delaware, Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee), driven here from their homelands by colonizers. We honor these traditional Native inhabitants of this place and uplift their historic, unique, and enduring relationship with this land, which is their ancestral territory.  We pay our respects to their Elders and their past, present, and future people, community, and culture.  While we cannot change the past, we commit to continued gratitude for the gifts of nature, along with ongoing respect, care, and stewardship of the land, each other, and future generations.

Schedule Details

Wednesday, May 10

William Pitt Union Dining Room A

Session 1: Public-facing Humanities

This session will include discussions of successful public-facing humanities projects at Pitt in classroom, research, and community outreach capacities.

Featuring:

Dr. Dan Kubis teaches in the composition and literature programs. In both, he teaches at all levels, from Seminar in Composition and Introduction to Literature to capstone courses. In Pitt’s Humanities Center, where he worked from 2016 to 2020, he expanded public programming and began the Public Humanities Fellows program, which creates positions with local cultural institutions for Pitt graduate students in the humanities.  

From 2015-2022, he hosted the Being Human podcast, which featured monthly interviews with artists and scholars in the humanities. He also reviews books frequently for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Boston Globe, Chicago Review of Books, and more. Dan received a PhD in English from Pitt, an MA in philosophy from the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a BA in philosophy and architectural studies from Pitt. 

Dr. Abdesalam Soudi is a Teaching Associate Professor in the department of Linguistics in the Dietrich School, a Faculty Fellow with the Honors College, and a Faculty Affiliate with the African Studies Center at Pitt. Dr. Soudi is the primary investigator of a project on Humanities @ Work in the Community, Health, and Tech Industries. He has been co-directing a master’s level course on cultural competency offered through the Institute for Clinical Research Education for 17 years.  He won the inaugural Diversity in the Curriculum Award in 2017 for his success in creating a diverse and inclusive learning environment; in 2018, he won the first-ever Pitt seed grant award for a proposal to build an engagement platform for humanities at work. Recently, he also led the creation of a newly established a scholarship to support linguistics research & internships & help strengthen the pipeline for underrepresented students.

Dr. Soudi is the founder of the Linguistic Internship Program, and he collaborates with diverse community and tech industries. In 2019, he was recognized as an “Honorary Employee” by M*Modal. In 2016, Soudi spearheaded collaborative work to design & host a first-ever Humanities in Health Conference at Pitt as part of the Provost’s Year of the Humanities Initiative. He chaired in 2017 a conference on “Cultural & Linguistic diversity: Living and Working Together”. As part of this work, Soudi directed a documentary on the meaning & value of diversity. In 2018, he chaired a cross-disciplinary conference on Family & Healthy U. In 2019, Dr. Soudi led a 4th conference on Humanities at Work in the Community & Tech Industry. In 2021, Dr. Soudi led a conference cross-disciplinary project on Engaging Humanities in Health. In 2023, he led the 6th edition of the humanities @ work conference.

His research interests include Electronic Health Records, Arabic Linguistics, Medical Discourse, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity and Cross-Cultural Communication. He is a Lead Innovator of The Cultural Engagement Playbook® which is focused on creating culturally and linguistically inclusive spaces for living and working together while embracing cultural differences. He has published his research in several journals and magazines. He co-edited a volume called Diversity Across the Disciplines in 2020.

Session 2: Versatile Skillsets

This session will include conversations on topics such as non-academic career pathways, untrained and under-trained academic labor, network-building, and career planning. 

Featuring:

Dr. Matt Aelmore (he/him) serves as the Grant Coordinator at Mid-America Arts Alliance for the Creative Forces® Community Engagement Grants Program, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts that funds community arts engagement projects across the country to improve the health, well-being, and quality of life for military-connected individuals. Prior to his work with the NEA, Matt served as the Director of Grant Compliance at Partner4Work, Pittsburgh's local workforce development board.

Matt is also an active and accomplished musician who has recorded and performed with a wide variety of artists including funk legend Betty Davis and Indonesian pop superstar Rhoma Irama. He holds degrees in music theory and composition from Wichita State University (BM), Manhattan School of Music (MM), and the University of Pittsburgh (PhD).

Dr. Sean Nonnenmacher received his PhD in April 2023 from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a past recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Engage Summer Immersive Fellowship, and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship. His research focuses on the relationship between sociolinguistic practices and beliefs about language and personhood in the United States and the Republic of Armenia. His dissertation is a digital and sociolinguistic ethnography of constructed speech (quoted speech and reported speech) and the role it plays in narrative, based on fieldwork with the US charitable organization GLSEN. He currently works as the coordinator of a queer oral history project for the Arizona chapter of GLSEN, where he also provides consultation on public policy issues.

Dr. Gayle Rogers is the Andrew W. Mellon professorship and chair of English at Pitt. He also serves as the Dietrich School Special Liaison for Outreach and Development and is affiliated with several centers at the university, including the Global Studies Center, Center for Latin American Studies, European Studies Center, and Cultural Studies program. His research interests include the history of ideas, global modernisms, translation theory, comparative literature, critical history, and the intersections of literature, economics, and risk theory.

He is the author of several books, including Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI, and co-editor with Sean Latham of The New Modernist Studies Reader: An Anthology of Essential Criticism His previous works include Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of American and Spanish Literatures, and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of English and has served on several editorial boards, including the journal Modernism/modernity.

Thursday, May 11

William Pitt Union Dining Room A

Session 3: Humanities Unbound

This workshop will explore innovative methods in the humanities including applications in the classroom, nontraditional publications, and an in-depth look at the resources and training available to faculty and staff at Pitt. 

Featuring:

Aaron Brenner is Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship, Technology, and Creation in the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. His areas of focus within the library include research data management, geographic information systems, Open Access library publishing, copyright guidance, digital repository services, the creation and use of digital research collections, scholarly and digital making, and multimedia technologies.

He has also taught courses at a variety of levels at the university, including for undergraduates in the First Experiences in Research program; for masters students in the Library and Information Science degree program; and for doctoral students in the Digital Studies and Methods certificate program.

Dr. Melissa Dollman has been an audiovisual archivist, curator, adjunct faculty, and researcher for several cultural heritage institutions including UCLA Film and Television Archive, Academy Film Archive, Schlesinger Library (Harvard), University of North Carolina, Tribesourcing Southwest Film, and Deserted Films (co-founder).

Recent publications include:

  • “Mobilizing Women In a Few Easy Steps! (A Feminist Triptych)," [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies (forthcoming summer 2023)
  • “Tribesourcing Southwest Films: Counter-Narrations and Reclamation,” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies on Indigenous Knowledges (co-author, June 2021)
  • “Borders and Boundaries,” a special issue of The Moving Image 23.1 (co-editor, forthcoming Fall 2023)

 Dr. Adam Hebert is a Visiting Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned his PhD in 2022. He has taught a range of courses in Film Studies, Film Production, and Composition. His research focuses on production cultures, cinematic technology and sports media. He also holds a BA in Cinematography for Emerson College and an MA in Film Studies from NC State University. 

Dr. Dana Och is a Teaching Professor in the English Department, Director of Undergraduate Studies for Film and Media Studies (critical studies), affiliated faculty with Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and a current member of the Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence. She received the Tina and David Bellet Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2022.

In addition to a recent publication on implementing Universal Design for Learning into online courses during the pandemic, she writes frequently on questions of genre, Irish cinema, cult, and horror, including publications on Neil Jordan’s Irish horror films, the post-colonial zombie comedy, the neopostmodern horror film,  transnational horror circulation in Rare Exports. and the gendered reception of Twin Peaks, Pretty Little Liars, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Breaking Bad. She co-edited the anthology Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies (Routledge 2014).