Humanists at Work
Mandel Center for the Humanities supports projects at Brandeis where humanistic study interfaces with communities beyond the university, and where students, faculty, artists and practitioners collaborate across the boundaries of discipline and profession.Humanities Skills Workshops
The Mandel Center for the Humanities aims to ensure that humanists are equipped with the skills they need to support scholarship and activism within the Academy and beyond. Towards this end we organize 'Humanities Skills Workshops' to teach skills like grant-writing, interviews and ethnography. Upcoming and planned workshops include those on artificial intelligence in the humanities curriculum, foreign language and digital humanities.Graduate Basic Skills Retreat
In conjunction with the Dean's Office and Professional Development, the Mandel Center sponsors a half-day retreat for graduate students to learn and review basic skills from professors. This included panels titled 'On Reading and Critical Engagement', 'How Do I Write?', 'The Ins and Outs of Professionalization in Academia' and 'Making a Five-Year Plan.' Panelists included Professors Yuval Evri (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies), Derron Wallace (Sociology), Sarah Mayorga (Sociology), John Plotz (English), Jonathan Anjaria (Anthropology), Amy Singer (History), and Ulka Anjaria (English).Faculty Public Humanities Grants
The Mandel Public Humanities & Community Engagement grant for faculty supports Brandeis faculty working on experimental and/or publicly engaged projects in the humanities, the arts and the humanistic social sciences. These include projects that have audiences beyond the academy, projects in the experimental or digital humanities, applied humanities work, and/or collaborative projects that create and sustain mutually beneficial partnerships with community organizations, museums, libraries or other cultural spaces or media. Our recent projects include new walking tours through local built environment, a database of Asian immigrant artists working in Paris from the 1880s-1980s, a project called 'Ottomans in New England' which traces the cultural legacy of Ottoman immigrants to Massachusetts and the broader New England community, and digitizing the Brandeis CLARC archaeological collection.Mandel Community Fellowships
The Mandel Center for the Humanities seeks to foster collaboration between humanists at Brandeis and the greater Waltham community, by offering a series of Mandel Community Fellowships to facilitate engagement with institutions across Waltham. We support students interning with the Charles River Museum, We are Waltham, and other community organization. Please find a list of current opportunities here.
What Could a Dissertation Be?
Fall 2022
For a video of the event click here
PhD dissertations in the humanities and social sciences have traditionally been scholarly proto-monographs. However, increasing numbers of PhD students are exploring alternative formats for communicating their research — formats such as a series of articles, graphic novels, films, public-facing blogs, apps and podcasts. Graduate departments are increasingly supporting these new forms, as are the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Mellon Foundation. In this seminar, current Brandeis PhD students Nai Kim (English) and Yi He (English) joined Anna Williams (Assistant Lecturer and Co-Director of the Writing Center, Birmingham-Southern College) and Iván González-Soto (PhD Candidate, UC Merced) to discuss the benefits and challenges of non-traditional dissertations.
GSAS/Mandel Career Fellows
Mandel is a proud sponsor of the GSAS Career Fellowship. This fellowship gives GSAS students across all disciplines skills to help them prepare for careers in academia, non-profits, industry and beyond. The goal of the program is to foster a community of students committed to planning for their post-MA or PhD future. We also hope that fellows act as ambassadors who encourage a robust discussion on professional and career development in their departments.
GSAS/Mandel Career Diversity Skills Grants for PhD Students
Fall 2021
In Fall 2021 the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Mandel Center for the Humanities piloted a new program that funded 10 PhD students from a range of departments to take a 10-week transferrable skills course at the Rabb School of Continuing Studies. The courses were intended to complement PhD training, offer skills, and widen career options for graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Read more about the success of this innovative program here!
Recall this Book Podcast
Recall this Book is a podcast hosted by John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry that seeks to shed light on pressing contemporary topics with a backwards or sometimes sideways look: each episode draws on a book or books from the past or an unexpected quarter to look at a current topic in a new way. Featuring interviews with writers talking about their own books, or scholars talking about the books that are helping them navigate best the world in which we live, these lively discussions hash out difficult present-day issues.From Recall This Book
With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for The Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental … Continue reading "154* Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson (Elizabeth Miller, JP)"
John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair” in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in “Lying in … Continue reading "153. What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)"
In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists’ prior expectations. The three discuss what it means … Continue reading "152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)"
Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up–we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why? To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature … Continue reading "151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP)"