Bryn Mawr Receives $800,000 Mellon Grant to Promote the Value of the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences
“With this grant, we want to make even more explicit the valuable ways that our humanities students, graduates, and scholars contribute to the advancement of society,” says Bryn Mawr Provost and project lead Mary Osirim.
The grant also looks to emphasize the many skills graduates of these programs bring with them and to introduce some potential new skills.
“Students with an undergraduate degree in the humanities or the humanistic social sciences have always developed the knowledge and skills that are valued by employers and applicable to myriad careers; these include close reading, writing, critical analysis, creativity, and reflection,” says Osirim. “In today’s world we also need to make sure all of our students are also equipped with the necessary digital competencies.”
The College will use grant funding to hire a postdoctoral fellow to assist faculty in integrating digital competencies into humanities and humanistic social science courses and to provide new opportunities for student work in the field of digital humanities.
“Every Bryn Mawr graduate needs to know the basics of coding, data analysis and digital communications and presentations,” says Osirim. “To ensure that opportunities to develop these competencies are consistently and sustainably provided to our students, we need to integrate these into our curricular and co-curricular offerings.”
Greater collaboration between humanities and humanistic social science faculty and the Leadership, Innovation, and the Liberal Arts Center (LILAC) is another key component of this initiative.
Through the grant, the College is going to hire a coordinator to work with faculty to develop a number of “intensives,” deep-dive courses that help students explore the rich array of career opportunities for students of the humanities, the humanitstic social sciences and the arts. Grant funding will allow faculty involved in this work to reduce the number of courses they teach as they devote their time to this important work.
The College already offers a number of highly successful intensives in Finance, Effective Grantsmanship, and Alternative STEM Careers.
To prepare students for a globalized marketplace, funds from the grant will be also used to provide more international internship opportunities for students majoring in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Bryn Mawr’s newest interdisciplinary program, Museum Studies, as well as the long-standing Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology will receive funding from the grant allowing faculty members an opportunity to develop new courses and to host international scholars.