The Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) at UC Santa Cruz has been selected to participate in a $1.35 million grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), of which the IHR is a member.
The grant was awarded for the second phase of Integrating the Humanities across National Boundaries, an initiative designed to foster new forms of collaborative research and partnerships among the organization’s international members via two pilot projects.
UC Santa Cruz’s IHR is one of four CHCI member centers and institutes that will lead the research through 2017 on one of the pilot projects, Integrative Graduate Humanities Research Education and Training (IGHERT). The project brings together faculty, doctoral students, and post-doctoral scholars in a series of structured collaborations to undertake jointly mentored, international research.
UC Santa Cruz will partner with the Center for 21st Century Studies at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University in Giessen; and the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University, Canberra.
The principal investigators from the UC Santa Cruz campus are Tyrus Miller, Professor of Literature and Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, and Nathaniel Deutsch, Professor of History and Jewish Studies and Director of the Institute for Humanities Research.
This pilot project will focus on the theme of “indigeneity”: the identities, cultures, politics, and legal rights associated with native or aboriginal status. Indigeneity today is a rapidly evolving topic, as globalization, media technologies, ecological concerns, and new political movements have radically changed the definition of what it is to be “native.”