Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Developing Learning Experience Design Courses at Rabb for GSAS Students

Professor Jonathan Anjaria received funding to facilitate the development of a Learning Experience Design course at Rabb - Graduate Professional Studies. Professor Elizabeth Santiago designed and developed five-week “micro-courses” that emphasized skill-building, non-traditional doctoral training, and networking and professional development for diverse careers. These courses were offered in the summer and fall of 2023 to humanities and social science GSAS doctoral students. 

Podcasting Internship Course

Professor Elizabeth Ferry was awarded funds for the mounting of a graduate internship course in podcasting. Through a partnership with Missing Link Studios, a Boston-based production agency specializing in connecting academic and cultural institutions with the public, doctoral students had the opportunity to participate in a semester-long series of workshops led by Professor Adam Gamwell, a Brandeis doctoral alumnus and one of the studio’s co-founders, and the host of the This Anthro Life podcast. Students also held internships with one of the studio’s current podcasts for the length of the semester. Ultimately, the internship enabled students to gain significant practical experience in a medium that makes wide-ranging public engagement possible.

A Digital Companion to the Mass Central Rail Trail

Professor Caren Irr received an award that allowed her to organize a team of faculty and graduate students to create the Digital Companion to the Mass Central Rail Trail. The project allowed doctoral students to engage in collaborative work and to cultivate Digital Humanities skills. During the summer of 2021, students engaged with community partners along the trail, such as the Weston Historical Society and the Waltham Land Trust. They also researched and planned the beginnings of a platform for the Digital Companion while working with specialists in  archives such as the Leventhal Map Collection at the Boston Public Library and the Boston Athenaeum. Irr envisioned integrating the Digital Companion into courses in the English department’s graduate curriculum that address methods, environmental studies, and mapping.

Medieval Women and the Book for a Digital/Public Humanities

This award enabled Professor Dorothy Kim to develop a new graduate seminar in the English department. To support this course’s development, Kim used The Connected PhD funds to attend the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Entitled “Medieval Women and the Book,” the new course allowed students to make use of public humanities and digital humanities tools, from writing targeted at general audiences to digital storytelling, game design, and digital communication, in their exploration of the influence of women and the place of gender in medieval book production. Ultimately, students emerged with a portfolio of versatile skills and experiences applicable in a diverse range of professional contexts.

Democracy and Social Justice

This award supported the development of a new course, co-taught by Professors Kryder and Hill, that integrated theory and practice through a collaboration between the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. As Kryder and Hill have noted, “The best setting for studying American politics at the graduate level is within American politics itself.” The course, open to graduate students in both schools, contained both a Democracy and Social Justice seminar and a complementary summer practicum. “This project gives students both deep practical knowledge of how organizations are confronting this issue as well as basic training in several skills that can be used for politically engaged academic work of other kinds, including skills in surveys, focus groups, digital advocacy and policy analysis.” In its first year, the course focused on the chronic problem of gender-based violence. Serving as a framework for future courses, the subsequent courses focused on, “one social group, one set of political or policy institutions and actors, and one political change strategy,” and aided the development of “creative PhDs with practical, interdisciplinary policy and advocacy skills." 

Faculty Book Group

This award supported the creation of a faculty group to read and discuss The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, by Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch. The book showed how universities can enable students' PhD work to have the most impact possible both inside and outside the academy, and how departments can enable students to have multiple opportunities for professional success after graduation. The group met twice to discuss the book and how to apply some of the book's suggestions for curricular reform at Brandeis. One of the meetings was with Leonard Cassuto, one of the book's authors.

MLA Summit for the Future of Doctoral Education

This award enabled faculty and graduate student representatives of the English department to attend the Modern Language Association’s Summit for the Future of Doctoral Education in November 2020. Attendance at this event’s workshops and discussions of the direction of doctoral training enabled the department to best adapt its curriculum, culture, and practices to the present and future needs of its PhD students.

Rethinking the English PhD from the Ground Up

Professor Ulka Anjaria received funding from the Connected PhD to lead an effort to redesign the PhD curriculum and requirements for the English department in light of the increasing awareness of the importance of training graduate students for a variety of careers following graduation. She and other partner faculty members worked with their colleagues in English, with substantial input from current students and alumni, to redesign the PhD program in light of nation-wide best practices. This project was the continuation of a successful Connected PhD grant funded the previous year where two English department faculty and a graduate student attended the MLA Summit for the Future of Doctoral Education. The goal of this renewed funding was to reimagine graduate education by changing the substance of the PhD program to help students gain skills necessary for a diversity of careers. This involved making practical changes to the English curriculum (for instance, instituting a dissertation portfolio option and requiring a new proseminar in the 3rd year to prepare students for the field exam), rethinking the English department’s website, and reframing admissions questions and criteria to make the program more inviting to applicants with a range of career goals, especially students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Graduate Student Basic Skills Retreat Pilot Program

This grant allowed Professors Ulka Anjaria and Naghmeh Sohrabi to create a one-day graduate student retreat in Spring 2023 for first to third year PhD students in Mellon-affiliated graduate departments. The goals of the pilot program were to target essential skills required to successfully navigate graduate curriculums and to provide professional development advice and instruction through sustained interaction with faculty and other graduate students. 

Promoting Culture Shift in Graduate Pedagogy

Professor Anjaria received funding to facilitate professional development programming for students in Mellon-affiliated programs that bridges the gap between academia and industry. “Doctoral programs are structured to train graduate students to become faculty,” he wrote, “and yet, nationwide, only a small fraction of PhDs pursue a career in academia.” Although the academic job market is declining, Anjaria wrote that “people outside academia increasingly value the social science and humanistic skills we teach in our graduate programs.” The goal of this project was to expose graduate students to the wide variety of professional contexts where people do humanistic and social science-related work and help them develop skills during graduate school that lead to fulfilling careers after graduation.

Professional Development in Musicology

Professors Desmond and Frey used Connected PhD funds to research and propose a revised Musicology curriculum that incorporates regular professional development training for students. The funding supported a series of planning meetings, including consultation with directors of graduate studies at other institutions. These conversations informed their plan for restructuring the curriculum to be implemented in the 2021-2022 academic year. 

Scaffolding Digital Competencies, Creating the Digital Portfolio

In this project, Professor Charles Golden collaborated with library staff in developing a digital curriculum for doctoral students. In large part, this effort consisted of identifying existing courses across the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts that enabled students to develop skills in working with digital content or conducting data analysis. In turn, this facilitated the building of a framework for progression between these courses so that doctoral students might more easily benefit from them, while also serving as more readily available benchmarks for students while on the job market.

Restructuring the NEJS Graduate Program

Professors Laura Jockusch and Darlene Brooks Hedstrom used this grant to support their efforts in revising and improving the NEJS PhD program requirements. They reconsidered the structure and curriculum of the NEJS graduate program, streamlined and standardized expectations and progress milestones, interviewed alumni and current students to build a more student-focused departmental culture, and proposed curricular changes.

Assessment and Restructuring of the NEJS PhD Program

Building on their previous project, Professors Laura Jockusch and Darlene Brooks Hedstrom received funding to assess, improve, and implement changes to the NEJS program in order to assist students in their professional development. They coordinated revisions to the NEJS curriculum, assessed professional development and career outcomes by interviewing NEJS alumni, and implemented new strategies to aid graduate students in their pursuit of diverse careers. 

Supervised Editorial Training with the Journal of Israeli History

This award supported a pilot program where doctoral students from Brandeis University and Tel Aviv University filled assistant editor positions at The Journal of Israeli History. This international collaboration gave doctoral students the opportunity to gain experience in the publishing industry. The students from both universities formed a cohort and worked closely with the journal’s editors to manage the workflow of articles from their submission, through the peer review process, proofing, and ultimately publication.

Sociology Graduate Alumni Oral History Project

For this project, Professor Laura Miller was awarded funding to create a repository of interviews with alumni of the Brandeis Sociology Department’s graduate program. This project helped sociology graduate students connect with alumni, forged connections between alumni and the department, and developed the Sociology Department’s understanding of its history. 

Toward a Criminal Justice Graduate Curriculum

Funding for this project supported the development of the Brandeis Justice Initiative. This program is an outgrowth of the ongoing work of the Brandeis Criminal Justice Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of faculty, staff, and administrators who have established relationships with criminal justice-related organizations such as the Petey Greene Program, Changing Lives through Literature, Emerson Prison Initiative, Boston Office of Returning Citizens, Judge Connelly Youth Center, and Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department. This project enabled graduate students to gain experience providing administrative support to a community-engaged initiative while broadening their pedagogical training and teaching experience by providing educational programming in the criminal justice system. Through this program, students supported “educational efforts to decrease recidivism, and increased capacity for people involved in the system to better their lives and find ways to benefit meaningfully from educational support structures.”

COMPACT

Professor Sara Shostak received funding to collaborate with the Vic and Bobbi ‘63 Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT). A Working Group of faculty and staff, from across the university, designed and launched this collaborative project which supported “faculty, staff, students, and community partners in their efforts to repair our world.” Graduate students who participated gained experience in designing and executing an extensive stakeholder engagement process and collaborated with community partners. 

English Department Alumni Outreach and Curriculum Collaboration Project

This grant allowed Professor Dave Sherman to create a new alumni engagement initiative for graduates of the English department’s MA and PhD programs. A graduate student worker gained experience in conducting alumni interviews, coordinating, and networking, as well as creating social media content. The goal of this project was to foster a professional network for current graduate students and alumni and strengthen connections to the department. 

History of the Wayland Public Library

Professor Amy Singer collaborated with the Wayland Public Library (Wayland, MA) in developing a written account of its history to celebrate its 175th anniversary. The goal of this project was to help students learn how to develop public facing history. The graduate students involved in the project took a leading role in research and writing the first product, the written history, beginning with an evaluation of the resources available; prepared a list of guiding research questions about the library’s history; determined which of these could be answered by the material available; and, finally, executed a published project (in printed and digital forms). 

Looking Back to Move Forward - An Evaluation of the PhD Program in History 

Funding for this project was awarded to Professor Amy Singer to re-evaluate the Brandeis History Department’s PhD program, by specifically reviewing its current graduate requirements. Professor Singer conducted interviews with current students and alumni, hosted faculty discussions, and proposed curriculum changes. The goal of this project was to assess and implement new strategies to aid graduate students in their pursuit of a variety of careers.