The African American and African Studies Department (AAAS) at ACLS Associate Member Michigan State University (MSU) shows that imagining and building a department can yield new possibilities and outcomes. Ruth Nicole Brown was hired as the inaugural chair of AAAS in 2020 and given the charge to lead…
When Professor Reba Wissner began her position as assistant professor of music at Columbus State University in Georgia in August 2020, she was already in the process of pivoting her own career toward public musicology. After nine years as an adjunct at various institutions, Columbus State was the last…
Fall 2023 began the pilot year of Culture, Technology, and Environment (CTE), a new major offered in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ACLS Consortium Member Arizona State University (ASU). Dean Jeffrey Cohen initially saw the potential for this collaborative curriculum when he looked across campus…
For the last ten years, Boston College (BC) has offered a minor in Medical Humanities. The majority of the students in the minor are not humanities majors; rather, they are often pre-med or majoring in a different STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine) field; some of them…
When one doctoral program diversified its approach to career preparation, its graduates began to experience more success across all the job markets, including tenure-track positions
How do we make space for undergraduates to experience genuine interdisciplinary collaboration within the disciplinary structures of the academy? This program was featured in the Winter 2024 issue of the Building Blocks for a New Academy newsletter. Since 2018, the Interdisciplinary CoLab at ACLS Associate Member University…
The Engaged English requirement offered by the English department at ACLS Associate Member California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) came about, as many innovations do, in response to a set of challenges. Those challenges included: concerns from administration about the cost of running community engagement opportunities…
The Public Humanities Integrative Concentration at ACLS Associate Member Oberlin College allows students in any discipline to integrate the public humanities into their coursework. Unlike a major or a minor, the concentration is designed to be both interdisciplinary and experiential. Students who successfully complete it take with them…
When Brian Reed was appointed Divisional Dean of Humanities in 2018 at the University of Washington (UW), an ACLS Associate Member, the number of majors in the division’s twelve departments were at a low point, and these numbers were affecting the overall mood among faculty. Dean Reed and…