January 25, 2021

This brownbag introduces doctoral students and graduate faculty to the various Humanities Engage immersive fellowship programs. Immersive experiences with organizations in the non-profit, public, and other sectors enrich the professional as well as academic preparation of Ph.D. students across the disciplines. Some graduate education leaders have even called for graduate internships to be part of every Ph.D. program. Current and previous immersive fellows, Ben Naismith (Linguistics), Sean Nonnenmacher (Linguistics), and Alyssa Quintanilla (English) reflect on their experiences at this event, with highlights below.

Full Panel

Ben Naismith

Ben Naismith, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics, helped startup Clearspace develop the study tool Leto (aka Learning Together) during his 2020-2021 immersive fellowship. He used his academic skills to give feedback on product design and implementation; his technical computational skills to collaborate with the computer scientists on the team and to experiment with potential natural language processing applications; and his linguistic knowledge to help to determine naming conventions which would be accessible and appropriate cross-linguistically.

Ben Naismith reflects on the value of an immersive experience outside of Pitt.

Sean Nonnenmacher

For his summer 2020 immersive fellowship, Sean Nonnenmacher, a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, worked with GLSEN Phoenix to create a StoryBank, a database of recorded personal narratives from Phoenix lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth. Because of his summer immersive fellowship, he is shifting the direction of his dissertation from an in-person, school-based linguistic ethnography to a digital, organization-based ethnography.

Sean Nonnenmacher reflects on the impact of his immersive fellowship on his dissertation and working towards life after getting a Ph.D.

Alyssa Quintanilla

Alyssa Quintanilla is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical and Cultural Studies, Department of English and a Humanities Engage 2020-2021 Immersive Dissertation Research Fellow. Alyssa is creating Vistas de la Frontera, a digital memorial that captures some of the places where migrants’ bodies have been recovered on the United States-Mexico border, as part of her dissertation, “A Matter of Waste and Bodies: Life, Death, and Materiality in the United States-Mexico Borderlands 1990 to the Present.” 

Alyssa Quintanilla reflects on the impact of and skills gained from her digital project, "Vistas de la Frontera," a memorial comprised of 360 videos.

Alyssa Quintanilla speaks about being an academic, a digital artist, and someone who has participated directly in activism.