Humanities Alliance

The Humanities Alliance offers a unique fellowship opportunity for doctoral students at The Graduate Center to train with LaGuardia Community College master faculty and implement their newly-acquired skills to teach their own classes at the college. Humanities Alliance Graduate Fellows receive robust professional development from faculty and administrators at both LaGuardia Community College and at The Graduate Center and participate in seminars and workshops to hone their teaching and mentoring skills. Specifically focusing on the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the program teaches Graduate Fellows to translate their specialized doctoral research into innovative teaching methodologies that benefit all learners and, especially, students who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education. Graduate Fellows committed to public higher education participate in, learn from, and ultimately strengthen the structures that support the diverse students that the City University of New York is intended to serve. These professional development trainings will be the basis of new programs developed by The Graduate Center Teaching and Learning Center that will be accessible to all graduate student teachers.

The four-year Humanities Alliance initiative also provides opportunities for humanities education research and public engagement. A national conference will be organized on this topic to discuss and disseminate what we are learning from the initiative. Humanities Alliance Postdoctoral Fellows will advance digital scholarly communication, public engagement, and research and analyze humanities undergraduate education.

To facilitate community building among the LaGuardia students and capture the work of the initiative, the Humanities Alliance maintains a blog on the CUNY Academic Commons. Rather than serve as a traditional website, it is employed as a living network of activity and contributes to the project’s sustainability by forging connections between faculty, mentors, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates that distance and commuting make difficult. The blog is a crowd-sourced, participant-created platform where student, faculty and staff across multiple campuses can share research, pedagogical innovations, and information about relevant humanities conferences, seminars, workshops and public programming throughout the city.