National Humanities Center Internship Program West

Modeled on our Triangle University Internship Program (TUIP), the National Humanities Center Internship West offered an immersive week-long workshop to train twenty-four humanities graduate students to develop collaborative, public-facing, research-based humanities content using digital media.

Participants convened during the summer of 2019 at San Diego State University to collectively build a five-episode podcast series addressing an emerging issue of public concern through the lens of humanistic expertise, to be broadcast August 2019 on a partnering public radio station. Participants were recruited from doctoral humanities programs in the western United States, especially those with expertise relevant to American communities of color.

The program sought to:

• Advance the democratic commitments of the professional humanities by inculcating in emerging humanities scholars a sense of responsibility to the human experience of diverse American publics.
• Foster new models of expertise that are responsive both to the traditional authority-based credentialing systems of the professional humanities and to the emerging concerns of university-based and public constituencies.
• Grow capacity for collaborative—team, interdisciplinary, cross-university—scholarship.
• Extend the potential of the professional humanities to curate archives of human experience in a way that adds depth and understanding to contemporary public affairs and cultural conversations.