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RESEARCH WORKSHOPS FAQs

Call For Proposals now Available

The 2008-09 CFP is now ready. Application deadline is April 9th, 2008. (Dowload PDF)

What are the Research Workshops?

The Research Workshops at the Stanford Humanities Center bring together groups of Stanford faculty members and advanced graduate students, as well as visiting scholars, and those at other local institutions to present their current research and otherwise explore topics of common intellectual concern. Workshops meet regularly (at least four times a quarter) during the academic year. Many workshop meetings, particularly those organized as lectures, conferences, or symposia are open to the Stanford community and to the public at large.

Proposals for new workshops or for renewal of current workshops are submitted by faculty and graduate students in Spring Quarter. These proposals are reviewed by a selection committee, and the slate of workshops for the following academic year is announced in June.

The 2007-08 workshops have been selected!

Click here to download a pdf copy of the 2007-08 Roster.

Core Goals

  • To realize and develop latent research agendas
  • To explore ideas and issues that cross the usual disciplinary or institutional boundaries
  • To provide a unique content for graduate work, where advanced students working on their dissertations receive the support and stimulation that come from participation in a shared intellectual enterprise with faculty
  • To help graduate students develop the professional skills marking their transition from their role as students to active scholars addressing a community of peers
  • To support collaborative research, particularly in the development of areas of research that no single researcher or institution could address alone

The program offers faculty and students from Stanford as well as other institutions a kind of engagement that exists nowhere else at the university. They meet outside of traditional departmental boundaries and in truly interdisciplinary collaborations to explore research topics that they themselves determine. The program thus supports faculty in their efforts to investigate and construct new areas of research in a time of shifting disciplinary boundaries, while encouraging graduate studies to participate in ongoing scholarly dialogues.

How diverse are the workshops?

These are faculty and student-driven groups, inspired by current intellectual interests. Some groups meet for a year to discuss a specific and timely event or issue. For example, a 1997-98 workshop focused on the newly published (and long anticipated) Gary Snyder poem sequence, Mountains and Rivers Without End. Others are organized around emerging disciplinary or area studies themes such as Interrogating Modernity and Postcoloniality or Asian Americas. Recently, workshops have increased their interdisciplinary reach; workshops such as Revisiting Race & Ethnicity in the Context of Emerging Genetic Research and Ethics in the Professions draw participants come from law, business, and engineering as well as traditional humanities fields.

How are the workshops selected?

The Humanities Center's Executive Committee serves as both the selection and review committee for the Research Workshops Program. Along with the Humanities Center Director and Associate Director, this group decides which workshop proposals receive funding. Workshops may need to submit supplementary materials before receiving final funding approval. The Center expects to fund approximately 15 workshops per year following the conclusion of Mellon grant funding in 2004-05.

How does the Research Workshops Program fit into the mission of the Humanities Center?

The Research Workshops Program fulfills the Center's mission to bring together those who will be shaping future studies in the humanities. In conjunction with its fellowship programs and outreach through public events, the workshops provide a crucial forum for scholarly research. The Center is committed to the proposition that the process of learning is a shared endeavor - where significant intellectual problems are defined, tested, and transcended in the context of continuing intellectual discourse. Too often graduate students in humanities disciplines find themselves working in isolation at the crucial research stage of their graduate work. Workshops provide one way that the Humanities Center encourages graduate students to enter into scholarly dialogues, and supports faculty in their efforts to break new ground in graduate research and training in the humanities.

How did the workshops program get started at Stanford?

Now in its tenth year, the Research Workshops Program has been sustained by two term grants from the Mellon Foundation through 2004-05. Inspired by a similar program at the University of Chicago, the Research Workshops were proposed by Keith Michael Baker in 1994 during his tenure as Director of the Humanities Center. Originally, no one was sure that a program like this would "take root" in an intellectual climate vastly different from that of the University of Chicago. Years later, the program has grown from five workshops a year to between fifteen and twenty.