It’s Still about Relevance: The Founding of a Humanities Collaborative as a Confident Response to the Humanities Crisis

Abstract

This article details the creation of a humanities collaborative in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Portland as an active response to counteract the so-called humanities crisis. Beginning as a low-budget endeavor in 2016, the Humanities Collaborative focused in its first two years on gathering interest and participation from faculty colleagues by hosting lunch discussions throughout the semester and a writing retreat in the spring. Collaborating across disciplines and departments resulted in a reinvigorated engagement with the humanities. In 2019–20 the CAS Humanities Collaborative hosted a campus-wide public humanities project focusing on the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States that includes a student-faculty fellowship program, the Public Research Fellows. The success of the Humanities Collaborative allowed the founders to attract internal funding and to apply for external funding to support the Public Research Fellows programming.