Humanities Without Walls Opportunities

The Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium links humanities centers and hubs of humanities research at 16 research universities throughout the Midwest and beyond.

The Mellon Foundation has awarded approximately $12,200,000 to HRI to fund eleven years of an extensive consortium of sixteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond. By leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses, the Humanities Without Walls consortium aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation.

Humanities Without Walls encompasses two initiatives:

1) Summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities who desire to explore careers outside the academy

2) Collaborative grants for multi-sited teams pursuing research that focuses on a Grand Research Challenge while clearly incorporating methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution

In addition to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Humanities Without Walls consortium includes 15 other institutions that belong to the Big Ten Academic Alliance— Indiana University Bloomington, Marquette University (who joined the consortium in 2020), Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University, as well as the universities of Chicago, Illinois at Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin-Madison—plus the University of Notre Dame. The humanities centers at the 16 consortial institutions will serve as the hubs for collaboration. The Chicago Humanities Festival also served as a key intellectual and infrastructural partner for the project from its inception through 2018.

You can learn more about Humanities Without Walls at the HWW website.