The Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Consortium has announced its 2016 Pre-Doctoral Fellows, including two University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate students: John Moore from English and Sara Thiel from Theatre. Moore and Thiel, along with 28 other graduate students from the 15 universities that make up the HWW consortium, will participate in a three-week long “alternative academic careers” workshop this summer.
The workshop, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to help prepare doctoral students for careers both within and outside the academy. Graduate students selected for this program will engage in intensive discussions with organizers of public humanities projects, leaders of university presses and learned societies, experts in the various domains of the digital humanities, representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations, and holders of important non-faculty positions in colleges and universities. The workshops will introduce opportunities and strategies for fellows to utilize their research interests and skills across various career paths. 
Moore explained that the service and administrative work he’s done outside the academy has often allowed him to explore many of the same questions that drive his research and teaching.
“While I can imagine furthering these ideas in a traditional academic career, I am eager to explore alternative career paths, within and outside of the university, that would allow me to pursue these ideas at different scales,” said Moore, “By attending the workshop, I hope to learn strategies for developing a public humanities career in the non-profit and public sectors.”
Thiel also expressed an interest in working both in and outside academia.
“Much of my work seeks to make art and performance accessible at all levels. In so doing I hope to bridge the gap between the academy, public arts, and performance by discovering ways in which the interests of these seemingly disparate communities are deeply intertwined,” Thiel said, “I was drawn to the Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Summer Workshop because I want to learn how to develop and present my particular skill set to organizations with similar goals.”
The workshops, facilitated and directed by the Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF), will take place July 18th through August 5th in Chicago.
Story and photographs courtesy of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.