A Passion for the Public Humanities

Special thank you to Danilo Caputo, doctoral student in English, for serving as a Graduate Student Researcher for the Humanities Commons (now Humanities Center). Here's what he learned from this experience.

As a graduate student in the School of Humanities at UCI, I have benefited from numerous opportunities for professional development as both a researcher and educator. However, solely fostering competencies in these areas, through critically important for any humanities scholar, does not wholly prepare one for the full scope of working in academia. Beyond research and teaching lie what we might label as administrative work: serving on committees, organizing workshops, planning and promoting events, crafting CFPs, reviewing proposals and abstracts, recruiting talent, managing a budget, and all the other vital tasks that contribute to a functioning and generative school or department. It is my belief, therefore, that through my administrative experience as a graduate student researcher at the Humanities Center, I have become a more well-rounded scholar and knowledgeable about what it means to work in the humanities today.
The Humanities Center (formerly Humanities Commons) has a clear mission: to spark new knowledge by providing faculty and graduate students with the resources they need to perform their intellectual labor, to foster intellectual communities where scholars can work collaboratively with each other and engage with the public, and to inspire conversations that matter. To put it another way, the Humanities Center serves as a hub for vital and vibrant interdisciplinary synergies within and beyond the School of Humanities. As a GSR with the Center, I had the opportunity to advance this mission through partnerships with scholars, administrators, and staff from across the university. Furthermore, under the guidance of the Center’s Executive Director, Amanda Swain, I’ve developed a repertoire of valuable skills in academic administration and program development. The various projects, events, and operations that I’ve been a part of as a GSR are too many to enumerate, but some of the most formative and rewarding experiences I’ve had during my tenure include the following: providing organizing assistance for the Forum for the Academy and Public conference that focused on exploring the various dimensions of the climate crisis; leading a grant writing workshop for minorities, women, and first-generation graduate students in arts, humanities, and social sciences; managing the operations of the Center for Medical Humanities which serves as a vibrant interdisciplinary space for exploring the meanings of health, healing, and well-being and fortifying a model of health care that is organized around the individual, reflective of cultural identities, and responsive to the needs of community; and assisting Julia Lupton, Director of the Shakespeare Center, with a series of public-facing events in conjunction with the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, including an educators day where local high school and middle school teachers attended a daylong workshop designed to help them develop lesson plans for teaching Shakespeare in their classrooms.
As a PhD candidate in English whose research focuses on Shakespearean drama but is also passionate about advancing the public humanities and advocating for various social justice issues and climate action, the work I did as a GSR for the Humanities Center reminded me of the significance and versatility of a humanities PhD. What we do—studying how people process and the document the human experience—allows us to actively engage with and enrich the world by sparking knowledge, fostering communities, and inspiring conversations that matter. My experience as a graduate student researcher in the Humanities Center has given me the training and tools to cultivate this ethos at UCI and beyond.