Introduction[1]

What is distributed intellectual leadership in the humanities? The Humanities Without Walls project investigated this question by experimenting with collaborative research across campuses and by designing a summer program that asked students to imagine how they might take their advanced training in humanities teaching and scholarship to a host of careers, to more diverse groups of people, and to the needs our society and our world faces. Repeatedly, we asked ourselves whether and how art, anthropology, archeology, design, history, languages, literature, philosophy, and religious studies could be disciplines that actively intervene public discourse and public policy in the interest of the public good. If so, how could we preserve the rigorous and deep exploration of the meaning of life and culture—the work humanities scholars have done in the past—while also creating an "applied" humanities that could be adapted to many purposes, contexts, and careers?

In this Working Paper, we reflect on the layers of learning that have accrued across the years of the grant—what graduate and faculty participants have learned about myriad forms the humanities might take, what we have all learned about the immense benefits and significant changes of working collaboratively, and of the need for deeper professional experiences we can build on and across campuses to cultivate the networks, collaborations, diversification, self-advocacy, and leadership we need to transition from the traditional model of solitary scholar to the ecosystem the humanities has become. That ecosystem includes campus partners as varied as librarians, archivists, digital experts, career services staff members, environmental sciences, colleagues in law and human and veterinary medicine, and public partners from state humanities councils, cultural institutions, publishing, nonprofits, to the business sector. We have produced this report, with immense gratitude, for the Mellon Foundation. However, we also hope it will be an invitation to humanities colleagues both inside and outside our universities to imagine themselves as part of a large, diverse network. We hope our work will activate new collaborations, new forms of learning and scholarship, and a far more capacious view of what and whom the humanities are for and what futures await graduate students, faculty, and public partners prepared to take the lead in adapting the best of humanities content and methods to the increasing and increasingly serious challenges facing us in the years ahead.

I. Humanities Without Walls - Origins, Structure, Goals

Humanities Without Walls (HWW) is a large-scale experiment in thinking about the nature and character of collaboration as a dynamic scholarly practice that has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2014. A consortium linking 15 research universities in the Midwest and beyond, HWW has developed a range of interdisciplinary research teams through nearly 40 unique awards, each of which operates on more than one member campus. First in conjunction with the Chicago Humanities Festival and then independently, HWW has also developed a residential model for pre-doctoral training in career diversity that has graduated 139 "alums," preparing them for futures in the public and private sectors—higher education included. This is humanities research and graduate training at an unprecedented scale.

HWW was conceived as a two-track initiative from the start. HWW Research Challenges were designed to encourage multi-institutional cooperation between scholars around major intellectual and methodological questions that require team-based approaches.

The first Research Challenge round (2015-2016) focused on the "The Global Midwest" (an attempt to map local Midwest histories and cultures onto global grids) and offered each consortial institution seed- money from which to develop full-scale proposals. Among those projects that came to fruition are:

• Hmong Memory at the Crossroads: Michigan State, Minnesota, Wisconsin- Madison
• "BlackLivesMatter": Racial Tension and Police Violence in the Midwest and Beyond: Purdue, Northwestern
• The Midwest Heritage Language Network: Ohio State, Michigan State, Illinois-Chicago

The second Research Challenge round (2017-2019) called for "The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate," where climate might be environmental (i.e., related to climate change) or metaphorical (i.e., engaging changing climates of health, urban culture, even writing itself). Sample projects from this round include:

• Arendt on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene: Northwestern, Chicago, Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
• Field to Media: Applied Musicology for a Changing Climate: Minnesota, Indiana-Bloomington
• Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity: Chicago, Purdue, Michigan

As these complex collaborations have unfolded, HWW has also developed Summer Workshops for doctoral students in the humanities seeking to engage more fully with what it means to pursue graduate education that will lead to employment either inside or outside the academy. The first four workshops were developed in collaboration with the Chicago Humanities Festival while the fifth workshop was developed by Antoinette and Jason with the assistance of Summer Workshop "alumni." Through a 3-week workshop in the heart of Chicago, students encounter a variety of organizations which depend on humanities-centric talent. Through site visits and informational interviews, HWW alums come away with a world of knowledge about the possibilities for work after the PhD—and with confidence that the skills they already have as researchers can serve them well in today's working world.

Committed to thinking through humanistic scholarship in newly interdisciplinary ways and to developing innovative methods for imagining graduate education, HWW has contributed to the vibrancy and the visibility of the humanities ecosystem in the 21st-century research university. It also offers models for how collaboration across sites both inside and outside of academic institutions might reshape the character, the reach, and the impact of humanities-based scholarship in the coming decades.

II. Our Evolving Purpose: Preparing the Next Generation of Humanities Scholars

Perhaps the most ambitious goal of the Humanities Without Walls Consortium is to enact a cultural shift in the way we value humanities scholarship and, accordingly, transform the ways we're preparing the next generation of humanities scholars. In the past, the academic humanities have been built on the career success of individual scholars. Over the life of this grant, many of us have begun to try to balance that version of the autonomous scholar with a commitment to cultivating intellectual leaders who also define success as lifting up the students, staff, faculty, and public partners committed to keeping "the humanities" energized, vital, engaging, and central to the liberal arts and public culture.

The Humanities Without Walls grant was premised on the belief that the humanities—as distinct kinds of knowledge, values, and methods—should have a meaningful impact not only in but beyond our classrooms and traditional publishing venues. By working in teams, we should be able to understand, represent, advocate for, and even intervene in the communities in which we live and work. We wanted to encourage graduate students to unearth connections between their research interests, on the one hand, and any number of workplaces as well as the public sphere, on the other. Ultimately, we hope they will become the leaders in building a far-reaching humanities network. We also believed that if we explored rather than retreated from the possibility that our work could have utilitarian outcomes, we could make more space in higher education for people with a strong commitment to community-based practice and social change. The numbers of first-generation students and students of color who have participated in our summer institutes suggests we were right.

HWW has multiple strategies for driving change. We have fostered public-facing and in some cases publicly-engaged practices and a collaborative model of scholarly activity through the faculty research challenge program. We have also experimented with new models for faculty/graduate student collaboration through the "humanities lab" model. And we have turned the eyes of future humanities scholars toward leadership roles beyond the academy through our summer program to engage rising PhD graduates at both consortium institutions and research universities across the country.

Together, we hope to shape the future of humanities scholarship profoundly. We want to drive meaningful change within and across institutions, in public and private organizations, and in the broader culture. The change we seek aligns with humanistic values such as equity, reciprocity, transparency, and creativity with our curriculum, teaching and learning practices, and our understanding of what it means to have a successful career from one's earliest days as a graduate student through the distinctly different stages of a faculty career. Our vision is to prepare a generation of humanities scholars to become intellectual leaders able to transform their institutions and organizations for the better. This vision includes a variety of faculty, academic staff, and student roles beyond the traditional pathway defined by the tenure-track.

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Over the course of a career, intellectual leaders share knowledge and expand opportunity, contributing to greater transparency and accelerating creativity. Intellectual leaders engage in mentorship of others, formally as instructors and informally. They also engage in stewardship of the institutional spaces for learning as a reciprocal dynamic, creating the conditions for greater equity.

The semi-transparent circles in the diagram are the things we should measure and reward. The solid ovals are the means by which we do these things, and they should not be confused with ends. Too often, these means are the only things we measure. A better measure of published scholarship, for instance, would look to evaluate the benefit of sharing the knowledge. This is a challenge HWW has taken up that meshes well with other Mellon initiatives, most especially the HumetricsHSS project.

The notion of leadership invoked here is not limited to those with formal titles. HWW has been led on its various campuses by folks who are Humanities Center Directors and in a few cases, Associate Deans. But the affiliated faculty who receive research grants and act as mentors to students are not typically in administrative roles. When we acknowledge that a central purpose of HWW is faculty and student career development, we see some benefit to the campus liaisons being those whose institutional roles already includes this component. This, in turn, has caused us to question whether Center Directors are the best group to lead the initiative? We agreed that they do bring significant organizational capacity to HWW, but that we also need to find ways to engage humanities department chairs (and probably directors of graduate studies) as well as deans and associate deans who oversee and have both evaluative and budgetary responsibility for the humanities more actively.

III. Evaluating HWW: Accounting for Culture Change in the Humanities

A. Piloting New Ways of Integrating Diverse Career Planning into Graduate Education

At a national level, conversations about careers beyond the professoriate began only after students failed to find jobs as professors. The National Predoctoral Career Diversity Residential Summer Workshops moved us, as faculty, from "alt-ac" commiseration to preparing humanities graduate students for diverse careers. As the students began to see how their academic training could be translated into myriad cultural settings, their own enthusiasm inspired many HWW-affiliated faculty members. When people with advanced humanities training and mindsets are employed in diverse careers, both job-seeking individuals and society as a whole benefit.

The Workshops began in summer 2015 and were co-planned by staff members of the Chicago Humanities Festival, the P.I. (first Dianne Harris and then Antoinette Burton), and the HWW Director of Operations, Jason Mierek. In 2015, 2016, and 2018, members of each consortium campus nominated four graduate students from their campuses. A faculty sub-committee of the HWW advisory board then selected two graduate students from each campus. In 2017 and 2019, the competition was open to all U.S. universities that offer a PhD in the humanities. Any university with humanities PhD programs could nominate one candidate. Ultimately, 30 students were selected for the program each summer (with the exception of the 2015 workshop, in which a student from Indiana University withdrew themselves from the program due to extenuating circumstances).

For the final 2019 workshop, we drew on the expertise developing in our own graduate student cohort. Margaret Nettesheim Hoffmann from Marquette University attended the 2017 national workshop. She was inspired to plan a version of the workshop for her home institution and was a full collaborative partner in planning the 2019 Chicago workshop.

Over three weeks, each cohort was asked to step outside their academic comfort zones. Students met with staff at the design thinking firm IDEO to translate an academic CV into a skills-based resume. The group visited a range of cultural organizations across Chicago—museums, libraries, publishers—as well as businesses where humanities scholars are employed. They met with PhDs working in the public and business sectors and learned about their career pathways. In addition, students learned to navigate networking events and arrange informational interviews with professionals in fields they found intriguing. Students found the informational interviews they were required to undertake especially instructive. In several cases, these conversations have opened a door to paid internships and even regular employment.

We originally focused on students in the early stages of their graduate studies. The Workshop is designed to be an important model for early "career" professional development. Students learn about careers in time to make important choices about courses and activities while they are still in a graduate program. In addition, the timing inspires some students to seek out otherwise overlooked opportunities back at their home campuses. For example, many campuses fund graduate students to work in a campus advising office or an institutional research office as an alternative to teaching assistantships. A growing number of campuses now offer paid internships on and off campus. We also anticipated that some students might choose dissertation topics that would position them for careers they discovered through the summer program. Perhaps most importantly, the workshop prepares students to be adaptive, resilient, creative intellectual leaders in whatever workplace they ultimately find themselves. They learn to identify and even create career choices for themselves by approaching career preparation like any other research project. In effect, they become their own career project managers.

Student Assessment of the Workshop The Workshops were, from the students' perspective, a transformative and impactful experience. Student surveys and comments reveal powerful intangible as well as concrete outcomes. Students gained a sense of hope, a broader vision of ways to be "successful," greater confidence in themselves and their abilities, new ways of thinking about the academic landscape in which they labor, and a deeply satisfying experience of community with their fellow graduate students. Taken together over the four workshops, students consistently reported they had a better idea of what careers they wanted (84%), felt better prepared for the job market (92%), could better translate their academic skills into other career settings (92%), and were more aware of careers beyond the professoriate (96%). The only survey questions where students registered some doubt involved networking. 84% of the students found "networking opportunities" valuable, but they were less confident about whether they improved their own networking skills (76%). One notable exception to this is intra- and inter-cohort networking.

This will be an interesting area for development in future graduate programs. Students noted that in the Workshops, they learned of many careers they didn't know existed. They also gained a sharper sense of what skills they had, what they lacked, and how academic skills could transfer to other settings. Students were fascinated by the power of vocabulary and the need to learn the language and culture of each career context as the first step in translating their accomplishments into meaningful attributes for employers. Many were struck by the importance of discerning their values, rather than just clarifying their skills, as a crucial step in finding satisfying careers. New tools like the website Imagine PhD will be an excellent follow up resource as students seek to match their values as well as scholarly interests with careers. Uniformly, students were enthusiastic about the informational interviews they conducted, often with people closer to their home institutions as well as in Chicago.

The students also offered helpful suggestions. In future Workshops, they would like to have more time to work on nuts and bolts projects like turning a CV into a resume. They welcome additional opportunities for structured reflection and for frank discussions of financial matters, including salaries and benefits in various fields. They recommended devoting more time to "fellow-directed and -centered activities" and peer-to- peer learning. Pointing out the absence of academic leaders at field trip sites, several students regretted the lack of focused discussion about their graduate work. We share their desire to be more intentional throughout the Workshop in connecting the work of the academy with the careers outside the academy. How can the questions and subjects that constitute the academic humanities as well as an individual's own scholarly interest be adapted to or be valued in non-academic workplaces? One of our goals going forward will be to ask alumni and other employees with advanced humanities degrees to reflect specifically on the ways their graduate work helps them to be successful in their current careers.

Role of Faculty As faculty members, we also learned important lessons. Since these may be especially helpful as Mellon program officers advise other groups, we break them out here for clarity and ease of sharing. Many past efforts have focused on preparing students for diverse careers without looking at the way faculty members, departmental cultures, and curricula would need to change if we are serious about preparing students to do anything other than be a professor. However, we're increasingly convinced that we need to engage faculty more broadly and deeply to prepare them to mentor students to be intellectual leaders who can make important contributions to the world of work outside conventional classrooms. Looking ahead, we can imagine developing a faculty version of the graduate workshop. Connecting faculty members with potential employers, introducing them to career tools (like Imagine PhD and LinkedIn) and practices like informational interviews, building their networking skills, and finding ways to engage with and even collaborate with both campus and community career professionals might give faculty members new confidence. For intellectual leadership to become central to the work of the humanities, faculty members must learn how to mentor students in new ways. At the very least, faculty members need to become informed supporters of career diversity. A deeper understanding of expectations students encounter when they seek jobs other than professor might also motivate more experimentation with curriculum.

Scalability Could the Workshop be scalable both up and down? Urban areas in the Midwest like Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit offer diverse public partners, but smaller cities like Ann Arbor, Iowa City, and Madison have potential, also. Without the expertise provided by CHF and their partner organizations like the design thinking firm IDEO, a workshop organizer might need to rely on visiting experts rather than site visits. Moving the Workshop to different campuses and/or developing smaller, perhaps shorter regional versions of the Workshop could have a host of benefits, for example, by connecting faculty members to potential local employers and partners. We are also aware that other experiments in preparing students for diverse careers are underway at universities around the country, often with support from the Mellon Foundation. We would warmly welcome the opportunity to organize or participate in national convenings where we can share our experiments and their outcomes.

Partnerships We learned a great deal from the Chicago Humanities Festival partners, but the organization is so unique that this model would not be easily reproducible. CHF's relationship with cultural partners in Chicago was invaluable. In other settings we could imagine working with State Humanities Councils or a small advisory board of local partner organizations willing to lead workshops and host site visits. In any case, we learned that whatever the partnerships, we would benefit from focused discussion about shared values and detailed MOUs. Faculty members have much to learn about the skills, activities, vocabularies, and expectations students with diverse career plans will encounter in the marketplace. But community partners and non-academic employers could also tap into PhD graduates' talents and expertise more effectively if they could also better understand the values, methods, and histories of humanities disciplines. All groups would benefit if we can learn ourselves and help students learn to explain how and why their graduate work-content, research, work process, analytical and writing skills, talents as teachers, etc .- is a genuine benefit for various workplaces.

Lessons Learned

As the discussion above suggests, the Graduate Workshop has been a tremendous learning opportunity for everyone involved. We anticipated that the graduate students would learn a great deal from professionals, site visits, and each other. But faculty and staff members of HWW also benefited enormously. The students themselves generously shared their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and career concerns. They mentored us into being better mentors to them. We discovered the great value in collaboration with public partners, but also significant challenges posed by the differences in our different missions, our ways of working (including our sometimes-disjunctive budget practices, timelines for planning, and the degree to which we were invested in connecting public and scholarly versions of the humanities).

• We see great value in sharing the HWW Summer Workshop syllabus with other doctoral degree offering universities along with lessons learned and to consult with other campuses about the potential to adapt a well-funded version of the Workshop in a large city to a variety of institutions in small towns and cities.
• We also hope to share what we've learned by creating succinct guides on aspects of planning such as a Workshop that emphasizes learning objectives, the kinds of expertise the Workshop cultivates, and best practices for working with partners on site visits.
• In our final Workshop, we have taken our discoveries about the kinds of activities students found beneficial to faculty. We held a Faculty Institute symposium in summer of 2019, in tandem with a portion of the Workshop, and hope to develop a future career diversity workshop for faculty with an emphasis on mentoring, forming collaborations with public partners, engaging PhDs working outside academe, designing structured approaches to reflection and peer mentoring, finding ways to connect scholarship and the values of nonacademic workplaces, and integrating assignments that help bridge that divide.
• Graduate students' success stories offer crucial insights into the kinds of diverse career preparation all of our graduate programs could be offering. We have already begun to share their ideas and our discoveries around the country through national convenings and digital archiving of projects. We hope to continue that dissemination, perhaps in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and scholarly societies like the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.

B. HWW Research Program: Piloting New Ways of Working in the Arts & Humanities

HWW Research Projects have produced a range of exciting research outcomes, some of which were anticipated in our original proposal. Others are surprising and offer promising new directions for HWW. We have identified four categories of outcomes for humanist scholars that arise from HWW funded projects: new experiences, new scholarly products, new ways of working, and new career horizons. The first two categories were both anticipated and enabled by the HWW vision as outlined in our initial proposal to the Foundation. The latter two emerged as valuable outcomes only after the consortium began its work.

New Experiences One of the most consistently valued outcomes of HWW grants by the participants in those projects are the new kinds of scholarly experiences they enable. HWW asks humanists to work collaboratively and to do so across institutions. In our second round of grants, HWW asked project leaders to build an explicit mentoring structure into the goals of each project, ensuring that each was a research- based learning opportunity for one or more students.

We understand these experiences to be valuable outcomes in their own right, apart from the products they helped to bring about. Our colleagues at UW-Madison offered some helpful language to characterize this category. "Ethnographic deliverables" are experiences that:

Convey a sense of the benefits and challenges of the collaboration process. We are just beginning to receive feedback from groups who participated in the first phases of HWW collaborative grants ("The Global Midwest") about their experiences, as the second grand research challenge ("Humanities in a Changing Climate") is ongoing.

Many, but not all, of the participants in HWW projects hail from disciplines unaccustomed to large-scale collaboration, with an emphasis on solitary, single- authored research. Faculty and students in the humanistic social sciences (Anthropology, Geography, and variations of Sociology for instance) were more accustomed to collaborative research and inter-institutional research. Because humanists are not routinely trained during their PhD years to work collaboratively, one major benefit of these projects is seen at the graduate student level. Anecdotal reflection of both faculty and students attests to graduate student satisfaction, particularly students who were given the opportunity to travel to their collaborators' campuses.

Working together on long-term initiatives in distributed teams has a transformative effect on scholars' sense of what they are capable of in areas such as communication, leadership, project planning and management. It also changes their ideas about the scale, reach, and distribution of their work.

One HWW success story began as a project called Religious Sound Maps led by two faculty members in Religious Studies at Ohio State and Michigan State. Part of the "Global Midwest" grand research challenge, the project aimed to demonstrate the diversity of faith and religious practice by producing a visual map populated with samples of sound, each capturing faith practices in communities all over the Midwest. The project inspired its leaders to learn new things about capturing digital audio samples, the challenges of archiving and cataloguing digital collections, and thrill of making an interactive display available to the very communities they had worked with to capture this dynamic portrait of the Global Midwest.

The project has gone on to win two successive rounds of funding from the Luce Foundation, each intended to help the project scale up—it is now called American Religious Sound—and to scale out, reaching a broader, more diverse and more public audience. The most recent grant from Luce was for $750,000 and will allow the project to complete a map of the United States and pursue invitations from the Smithsonian Institution for an exhibition in Washington D.C.

Prior to HWW, neither Isaac nor Amy—the Religious Sound Maps project co-leaders—thought of themselves as digital humanists, public intellectuals, or project managers. None of them had hired or supervised software engineers or metadata librarians. But now they do and they have. And their views of what their scholarship is, who it can inspire, and how it can travel are fundamentally transformed.

New Scholarly Artifacts With the aim of reaching a broader audience and communicating the value of the humanities in a compelling, public way, the Consortium called for and supported grants that would produce scholarly products apart from those most commonly associated with humanities scholarship. The list below highlights a few of these which, as a group, tend to be more digital, interactive, multi-modal and media rich, and more broadly accessible via public and/or open-source distribution networks.

Documenting the Diversity of the Human Condition

Safoi Babana-Hampton's film Hmong Memories at the Crossroads (http://hmc.cal.msu.edu/) has been screened around the world and has gone on to be nominated for multiple awards. It won the 2016 Mediterranean Film Festival, in Cannes. This was Babana-Hampton's first foray into filmmaking and her directorial debut! Today, she counts film-making and film-studies as key elements of her scholarship and recently helped to launch a new film-studies certificate with a focus on international cinema in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University.

Shaping Public Policy

At Purdue, Dr. Paula Leverage's project "The Impact of Novels on Prisoners' Theory of Mind and the Potential Integration of a Fiction-Based Empathy Experience as a Component of the Pre-Release Program Prior to Re-Entry into Society" moves beyond an exploration of prisoner literacy to explore new policy interventions. Her efforts include the study of novels to be distributed to prisoners for the project as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons' policies on literacy programs in prisons, among other select policy documents with the aim of crafting new policies that might make prisoners' transitions out of incarceration more successful.

Critical Co-Making in Transmedia

At UIC, project co-leaders Jagoda, Brier, & Rhyne led a summer workshop to engage youth from Chicago. The workshop participants adopted the term "structural violence" to articulate the mass deprivation of health through systems, institutions, and the policies that govern them. Taking the information garnered through the oral histories of the adolescent experience of now adults, the adolescents sought to understand the performance of structural violence in the specific neighborhoods. With context and analysis, the youth embarked upon a process of crafting stories set in specific areas (Bronzeville, Englewood, and Hyde Park), time periods (1940s, 1983, and 1995), and sociocultural and political climates as a means to further explore the interplay between individual experiences and the socioecological frameworks surrounding these fictional characters. Once the stories were drafted, the youth conducted research that would further inform the development of their transmedia collages in three forms—sonic, visual, and text.

New Ways of Working A surprising result of our assessment of the first grand challenge projects was a common feature of the successful projects. Each had made a significant effort to scaffold collaborative work by mentoring graduate students involved in the grant and encouraging their participation as co-equal partners in all phases of the project. Some of these projects made mentoring of students an explicit goal in its own right. As we experimented, we also recognized the need for faculty and graduate students to learn how to be part of teams and for humanities departments to take up the project of recognizing, evaluating, and rewarding new formats and outcomes. We are very grateful that the Mellon Foundation is also supporting the HuMetricsHSS "Humane Indicators" project at Michigan State University and the Imagining America: Artist and Scholars in Public Life organization's Leading and Learning Initiative Organizing Institute, focused on the evaluation of public scholarship.

When we asked faculty members to develop more genuinely collaborative ways to work with their graduate students, impressive innovations resulted. The most significant of these thus far is the Graduate Lab Practicum (GLP), an explicit requirement of all grand challenge round two projects. The RFP for "Humanities in a Changing Climate" read as follows: "The Grad Lab Practicum offers a way for graduate students to shape the forms that collaborative practice takes and to help the research group reflect on the limits and possibilities of collaboration in the context of the project as a whole .... Ideas for what a Humanities Lab Practicum could and should look like will arise out of the intellectual content of research projects themselves, with graduate students as equal partners." To assess the success of the GLPs, we asked faculty and graduate students who participated to tell us what they did and how they benefited from the experience.

Graduate Lab Practicum Highlights

Legacies of the Enlightenment

Graduate student Michael Stokes has "had the opportunity to collaborate with those directly involved in the project as well as technical support staff here at MSU and more importantly, professors, graduate students, and educators outside of my immediate community .... I have had the opportunity to hone my skills with image editing software and gained insight from others on how to make the images I craft more accessible to those living with blindness or low vision. Being able to work within a framework aimed at striving towards the oh-so-necessary but oh-so- unreachable universal access tenets of universal design has challenged me to grow as a thinker and as a producer of media."

His colleague and fellow graduate student Jessica Stokes has "been able to advance my understanding of online accessibility while generating image descriptions, formatting documents to be more easily read by screen readers, and formulating documents to circulate on the Legacies of the Enlightenment website .... I have had the opportunity to get an inside view not only of a well-thought digital humanities project but also of the work that goes into securing funding, connecting with contributors, and ultimately hosting their work on an accessible platform. This fall, my graduate assistant placement is in the digital scholarship lab, and I am excelling in my current work thanks in no small part to the work I began over the summer with Legacies of the Enlightenment .... Both the grant-writing process as well as the journal solicitation/editing process are skills that will support me as a graduate student and in my desired future role as a professor."

Transmedia Collage

Patrick Pagoda, a faculty P.I., noted that "Graduate students at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago were incorporated into all workshop planning and execution activities. They prepared dossiers about the histories of the South Side and climates of structural violence. They also participated in putting together all key pedagogical materials for the workshops in both 2017 and 2018. Moreover, the graduate students participated as co-teachers during the workshops, and they assisted in post-production activities. ... Starting in the fall of 2018, the graduate students at UIC led the work on post-production of all the South Side Speculations exhibition materials and scripts. They also participated in an interdisciplinary graduate humanities lab in 2019."

Field to Media

Mark Pedelty, faculty member and P.I., reports that the GLP formed a strong bridge between the research and career diversity work of the HWW grant: "One grad has a faculty job at St. Olaf! Yan Pang is teaching composition at St. Olaf. She enthusiastically took part in the training work here at UMN and our lab work in Vancouver. Elja has been able to parlay some of her HWW training into her teaching in the video sequence at UMN, and was given an award for her excellent teaching, and is also integrating it into her dissertation. Tara is moving into the PhD as well and developing her skills apace. Technically, her production might have been the very best of the lot."

The Corpus and Repository of Writing (CROW)

Faculty member and P.I. Bill Hart-Davidson reported that the project has taken the aim of making mentoring a central rather than peripheral concern to heart. The project leaders and participants have a CROW "playbook" to make the collaborative elements of working on a multi- institutional (and multi-time zone!) project more explicit and to help new participants learn to work well together. The playbook includes guidelines and practical examples to show what successful collaborative work looks like within the scope of the project.

As each of the examples above make clear, HWW HLP research participants emerge with a transformed sense of their career goals and a new horizon of possibility. We see that they are more engaged with broader publics, are more comfortable working collaboratively, are more adventurous in exploring new scholarly formats, digital tools and techniques, and are more invested in the success of those around them as an important aspect of their own scholarly identity.

Just as we did with the GLP, we see an opportunity to become more intentional about the career transformation element with faculty. We might consider a "New Horizons" summer workshop, parallel to the summer workshop for students, intended to help for faculty. This could be instituted as a component in a future HWW grant. Such a session might be hosted on the campus of consortium partners and consist of a working meeting, with sessions designed to help faculty capitalize on features that have emerged as HWW strengths and led by HWW liaisons and project leaders. The overall aim would be to help participants envision their work as more public, engaged, digital, and collaborative.

CONCLUSION: MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

For the most part, the activities of this grant have been successful beyond our wildest dreams. However, recognizing the we often sacrifice the ability to glean the most powerful insights by avoiding honest admission of failures, we want to include the painful as well as inspiring lessons we've learned from this project. We have come to see that in many cases, faculty members planning and conducting collaborative projects not only need administrative support. They also need thoughtful mentoring. One of our goals going forward is to build much more deliberate mentoring into our work together from the earliest planning stages through the research process. This kind of ongoing mentoring by seasoned peers and by experts from various sectors also fits into our new emphasis on faculty (and graduate student) development over the course of a career. Our hope is that these hard-won discoveries will be valuable to the Mellon Foundation and to future research teams.

1. Steep institutional learning curve in administering complex grants: Humanists tend to be accustomed to receiving individual fellowship support from agencies like the NEH, ACLS, Guggenheim and the like. This kind of award typically does not involve much interaction with local bureaucracy, and certainly not in a sustained way. Learning how money is disbursed, how it may or may not be spent, which offices to deal with to get disbursements and keep accounts-these were initial and even ongoing management challenges for some teams. That caused delays in the timeline of the work and distractions from the research or collaborative efforts slated by the grant. The grant leaders themselves also faced the challenge of learning how to move money across 15 different institutions.
2. P.I. inexperience: Most P.I.s across the consortium were new to this kind of role. In some cases, this meant that they had little experience that prepared them to lead, direct, guide and/or manage their group, whether locally or in collaboration with institutional partners. Other P.I.s understood themselves to be leading the application for the grant and were surprised to learn they would also be principal administrators of the grant—monitoring the budget, organizing the work of their team which involved planning meetings and ensuring follow through, filing regular reports, and providing rich communications to their teams but also to their campuses, consortial members, and nationally. In some cases, this lack of understanding led to breakdowns in communication across the team and a delay in events or other work plans. Despite strong messaging from the lead P.I., Antoinette Burton, and her staff about both their capacity to provide help and the resources available via their own campus humanities centers, problems arose and projects languished in the few cases when communications seriously faltered.
3. Domino effect: In addition, in those cases in which the leadership of a team was unsuccessful, for whatever reason, collaborative energies quickly dissipated. For example, in the worst-case scenario, the teams fell apart in response to a lack of communication, a significant shift in direction for the project that was not of interest to the initial members, or a general lack of organization by the P.I.
4. Managing changes and challenges in the life cycle of the grant: When P.I.s and their teams are not all on the same page with respect to goals, collective and individual responsibilities, process, and desired outcomes of a collaborative research project, problems inevitably result. When that work changes—as it invariably does due to all manner of factors—lack of flexibility and of agreement about how to change course can derail even a well-planned project. When teams reached out to us for help, we could readily assist, chiefly by encouraging them to produce a new plan of work and a revised budget, especially if a No Cost Extension was what was needed.
5. Community partners: When collaborations with partners beyond our campuses succeed, the results can be stunning. Once again, many faculty members have not had experience in setting up and managing collaborations with public partners. Faculty need training to understand questions of mission (what activities can both enrich faculty research and help an organization fulfill its mission?) of directionality (who is in charge and how reciprocal are the relationships between the academics and their extramural colleagues?), and access to resources (how do the monies flow?). There are issues that should be built into the project design from the start and, like any other part of that design, should be regularly monitored, assessed, tended to, and celebrated.
6. Graduate students as equal partners in the work of the grant: Many faculty members used to working independently have not had experience in designing research partnerships with graduate student collaborators. Initially, some of the research teams primarily asked graduate students to serve as clerical or organizational labor or they perceived students as "graduate fellows," who were being funded to write their dissertations ex parte rather than to be active participants in the research and work of the grant itself. The Graduate Lab Practicum was a critical innovation that gave teams a useful framework within which to imagine diverse roles within a research team for both faculty and graduate students. Moving forward, we are documenting the work of the Humanities Labs to provide models of more productive, generative, and deeply engaged faculty-student research collaborations.
7. Consider assessment of each award—including both research grants and summer fellowships—from the outset: An explicit and unified goal of career development could help to bring an evaluative focus to all HWW awards going forward. We would hope the process could be participatory with faculty and student awardees and involve some individual goal setting when a new award is made, shared criteria for measuring the success of the award(s) during and after the project or fellowship is completed, and some reflection and aggregable outcomes reporting at the end. We see an opportunity to work with another Mellon-funded initiative which we understand to share some of our values related to formatively rich, development-oriented career evaluation: the HumetricsHSS project.

IV. Looking Ahead: Build reciprocal relationships and re/distribute HWW resources in ways that allow sustainability beyond the award.

The work of HWW so far has been to try to pluralize models of humanities scholarship in practice through a combination of collaborative research and career development training for PhD students. The task now is to cement reciprocity and redistribution in our work moving forward. That reciprocal ethic is built into HWW methods now but it needs fine-tuning, in part because this is simply hard work, in part because we are just beginning to see, and to build, the kinds of feedback loops we need as we process the work we have done, and overseen, in the last five years. Embedding reciprocal structures and practices in diverse and inclusive intellectual projects is key to the long-range transformations of academic culture in the humanities to which HWW aspires. It means using HWW and humanities centers precisely to decenter HWW and humanities centers by making them sites of redistribution and reciprocity—so that they are centrifugal rather than centripetal forces for the boundary-crossing and wall-breaking we see as our principle mission.

Guidelines for the most effective means of institutionalizing the reciprocal and redistributive values of HWW around humanities work, collaboration, faculty careers and graduate education are emerging at the center of this enterprise, as we have detailed above. The greater challenge is to generate modes and practices that emerge from local conditions in concert with HWW methods and in active dialogue with the wide range of institutional partners HWW has cultivated. These are rapidly changing times, politically, demographically, socially, economically, ecologically and culturally. Our ambition must not only be to respond but better to anticipate so that humanities-based scholarship and practice can proactively serve the present and the future at once.

Notes

[1] The ideas in this Working Paper were discussed in the consortial partners' annual meeting in July 2019. Both the PI (Antoinette Burton) and the Director of Operations (Jason Mierek) participated in discussions of drafts and contributed to some of the sections as well.