Creating and Activating Communities: An Interview with Martha M. F. Kelly, NHC Vice President for Scholarly Programs

This past spring, we talked with Martha M. F. Kelly about her first year as vice president for scholarly programs, her perspectives as a former NHC Fellow, and her thoughts on the current state and future possibilities for humanities research.

NHC: You’ve just finished the selection process for next year’s Fellows. Congratulations! Competition for NHC fellowships is famously challenging (the success rate this cycle was 5.4%). Can you walk us through the selection process and provide some insight about how former Fellows have cracked the code, and offer advice for future applicants?

MK: We have refined a process over the years. What I think makes it work are its two primary stages of review. Once the applications are in, each one is assigned to three peer reviewers from a pool of maybe 900 former Fellows, subject experts, or a mix of other scholars. The second stage of review of the top 100 finalists leans towards generalist readings from all members of our selection committee. Successful applicants thread that needle of compelling both disciplinary peers and extra-disciplinary readers.

In my experience thus far, successful applicants are typically able to speak effectively to the larger meanings of their research. They have this big view, even for things that might seem niche to someone else. Yet, they don’t lose sight of the persuasive specifics.

One former Fellow told me that they weren’t awarded a fellowship at the Center until their eighth application! Don’t get me wrong: there is no part of our application process that either requires someone to have previously applied or that rewards them–or, for that matter, penalizes them–for having previously applied. Sometimes things align just right.

NHC: Is there anything about being a Fellow that helped inform your experience now working here? Have you reached out to any of your predecessors? If you have, were they able to give you any sort of actionable insight that has helped you grow and excel in this role?

MK: You know, there is a lot of continuity between the work that my predecessors have done and how I view my role. The only predecessor I was unable to meet is Tony Kaye, who’s no longer with us. It was a real honor to sit down for lunch with Kent Mullikin, my earliest predecessor and one of the first employees of the Center. He was in this position for 35 years and really laid a solid foundation for the residential fellowship. I still keep in regular contact with Matthew Booker, our previous vice president for scholarly programs, and he’s been an amazing help.

I would say what made my time here as a Fellow so productive was that I felt welcomed and taken care of—individually, and as a cohort. What this staff does, and ideally what the person in my position does, is to create a context of generosity and rigor—a rigor that is always imbued with curiosity. That is something that I hope never changes, and I don’t want it to change on my watch.

Additionally, I’m trying to build on the work of my predecessors to make our programs more accessible—to build a more diverse, more inclusive community of Fellows from different kinds of institutions.

NHC: You’ve been very focused on the NHC as a community; you’ve spoken at length at different times in the year about the Center as a “place” with a particular character and history. Can you talk a little bit about what you hope for the Center being more “place-based”?

MK: When I was a Fellow, I was also working at a distance with some colleagues at the University of Missouri to set up an Interdisciplinary Migration Studies Institute there. A big piece of our programming and of getting that institute up and running and of creating genuine community around migration studies was in work that we were doing with community-based participatory research. That experience, as well as partnering with other faculty and organizations, really drove home to me how the humanities, at their best, are often very grounded in the local.

My contention is not that all humanists need to be doing this. But what that experience taught me was that there’s even more power in the humanities than we often think about, if we simply turn to the communities around us. Those communities are actually doing humanities work. They are gathering and collecting and curating knowledge about their communities. They are archiving in certain ways. They’re telling their stories. They are advocating for what they want. And they’re sharing accounts of what their needs are. I think because the humanities often feel less applied than a lot of disciplines outside of the humanities, we often forget how many folks are doing the humanities outside of the Center, outside of universities.

Similarly, the humanities are much better able to explain what they do and advocate for what they do when they’re connected with local communities. I think not only the humanities more generally, but also the Center itself, will benefit from recognizing what we gain from and how we’re shaped by the communities in which we’re located.

Disciplinary Exchange and the NHC

“The various humanistic disciplines remain largely isolated from one another, and the humanistic disciplines as a whole remain generally isolated from the social and natural sciences.” —Steven Marcus, “The Idea of the National Humanities Center”

In his recent column for InsideHigherEd.com, “A Blueprint for Tomorrow,” historian Steven Mintz advocates for “dismantling traditional silos between disciplines” to give students “a more holistic education” that prepares them “to think both critically and creatively about the world around them.” Based on findings from the Humanities Indicators project, the move toward interdisciplinarity among graduate students and researchers is already underway.

Fortunately, disciplinary exchange has been a focus of the National Humanities Center since its inception. In his 1975 statement on the need for the Center, NHC cofounder Steven Marcus noted that “the various humanistic disciplines remain largely isolated from one another, and the humanistic disciplines as a whole remain generally isolated from the social and natural sciences.” Marcus argued that the Center would be “multidisciplinary in composition…to create a community of minds operating from a diversity of professional and intellectual perspectives upon certain common interests and problems.”

Writing in a 2021 op-ed for InsideHigherEd.com, former NHC president and director Robert D. Newman anticipated Steven Mintz’s recommendations and mirrored the concerns of the Center’s founders 50 years prior when he proposed that for the humanities to flourish over the next decade, “they need to make alliances with and contributions to multidisciplinary initiatives focused on the numerous crises in humanity, not humanities.”

This focus on multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinary exchange is a hallmark of the NHC fellowship experience, and has driven some NHC Fellows to construct new approaches, or develop new theoretical frameworks, that draw on other disciplines. For instance:

• In an interview recorded for the NHC’s Humanities Moments archive, historian William E. Leuchtenburg (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1978–81) described a seemingly routine exchange between himself and another Fellow, a literary scholar who implored him to seek out analyses of poetry to refine his project on presidential legacies and decision-making. The insights Leuchtenburg gleaned from those analyses helped him think through emotional undercurrents, which the archive routinely obscures, for his book In the Shadow of FDR (now in its fourth edition).

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  Judson Herrman’s 2006–07 fellowship project employed the expertise of digital imagists—and mycologists, as well—to reconstruct decaying manuscripts. Combining high-tech imaging and Herrman’s classical language expertise, Herrman and his colleagues deciphered portions of the Archimedes Palimpsest, which changed our understanding of key events in ancient Greek history.
• Timothy Stinson (NHC Fellow, 2021–22) partnered with bioarchaeologists to uncover insights into ancient bookmaking practices, animal husbandry, and economic models of the manufacturing of parchment; their teamwork led to the discovery of former species of sheep used in the parchment-making process and a viable method of extracting DNA samples from manuscripts.
• Miriam Posner’s 2023–24 fellowship project drew on her background as an information studies scholar and digital humanist to examine the inner workings of global supply-chain management and consider the human labor associated with meeting the needs of consumers within a system which treats the world like a computer.

The key element in all of these efforts was helpfully framed by Harvey J. Graff (NHC Fellow, 2013–14) when he described the process of interdisciplinary discovery as a team-driven exercise fueled by “good questions” which seek to address “important problems” by compelling researchers to ponder, “how can we try to answer them in different ways?”

The impulse toward interdisciplinarity also informs many of the Center’s recent and upcoming programs, including: the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Project, AI and Digital Literacy institutes in Kansas and Oklahoma, our upcoming collaboration with Howard University, and the COVID-19 Oral History Project.

As the application window for the 2026–27 fellowship competition opens, we look forward to seeing even more innovative work from scholars working at disciplinary intersections to extend and enhance our approaches to humanistic inquiry.