Public Humanities Professionalization

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Questions about the fellowship or application can be directed to Tanya Clement.

To be announced. 

To stay up to date with HI programs and events, join our newsletter.

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Digital Writing and Research Lab

• Establishing a Digital Research Ecology, 90 minutes

  • Description: Research increasingly involves managing a continuous stream of articles, alerts, newsletters, notes, citations, and digital materials and in many registers from academic to public sources. This workshop will help you design a sustainable digital research ecology that moves information from discovery to collection, organization, and eventual use. We’ll explore tools and techniques for automating parts of this process while keeping researchers in control of what they collect and why. We will pay special attention to combining both academic and public oriented discourse.
  • Activity: Map your existing research workflow and build a customized system for discovering, capturing, organizing, and revisiting research materials.

• Writing Processes and Platforms, 90 minutes

  • Description: Writing rarely happens in a single document anymore. Notes, PDFs, bookmarks, citations, drafts, AI tools, and collaborative platforms all shape how a project develops. This workshop will help you design a writing process across platforms, with particular attention to how information moves from collection and annotation into drafting, revision, and publication.
  • Activity: Create a platform map of your current writing process, identify points of friction or redundancy, and redesign one project workflow from research through composition.

• Planning a Podcast Series, 90 minutes

  • Description: A successful podcast is more than a good conversation and a microphone… it requires a concept that can sustain multiple episodes, a clear audience, and a repeatable format. This workshop will help you develop an academic and researched idea into a public-facing, coherent podcast series, from the larger concept and episode arc to guests, formats, and production planning.
  • Activity: Develop a podcast series blueprint, including its central concept, intended audience, recurring format, and a preliminary plan for three episodes.

The LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office

• Describing and Interpreting Museum Artifacts, 90 minutes

  • Description: Academics need to describe and interpret, succinctly and accessibly, the complex histories embodied by artifacts in museum exhibitions. Through a selection of hands-on workshops, you will learn how to handle, assess, describe, analyze, and write about artifacts for museum exhibitions using historical materials drawn from the Benson Latin American Collection as case studies. Application and permission from the instructor is needed since the workshops are given as part of a graduate-level “Historical Museums” class.
  • Activity: Develop condition assessments or interpretive exhibition labels

• Visualizing Cultural Heritage, 90 minutes

  • Description: The visualization of archival and bibliographic meta/data gives the public the ability to explore cultural heritage in ways that would not be possible in the physical world. Visualization tools enable you to illustrate connections between cultural heritage, people, geography, and across time, facilitating not only information retrieval but also learning, teaching, and research. Through a selection of hands-on workshops, you will learn how to transform descriptive information (e.g., archival metadata and bibliographic catalog records) into datasets that can be used to visualize their connective, geospatial, and temporal dimensions. Permission from the instructor is needed since the workshops are given as part of a graduate-level “Digital Libraries” class.
  • Activity: Develop digital maps, network visualizations, or interactive timelines using cultural heritage descriptive records.

Scholars Lab

• Creative Coding: Computational Approaches to Sound and Music, 60 minutes

  • Description: In this virtual workshop, you will learn how computational methods can be used to create music and sound art, and explore ways to incorporate these approaches into your own creative practice. 

• AI & Research: Inputs, Outputs, and Ownership, Online, 60 minutes

  • Description: Generative AI raises copyright questions at every stage of the creative and research process. This online workshop will help you explore practical and ethical approaches to using AI in teaching, research, publishing, and creative work.
  • Activity: Complete a brief evaluation of the strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations of AI-assisted output.

University Writing Center

• Pitching Your Project to the Public, 90 minutes

  • Description: Academic projects often need to travel beyond academic genres to potential collaborators, funders, community organizations, journalists, and broader publics. This workshop will help you identify what matters about your research to different audiences and develop concise, compelling ways to communicate its stakes without simply “dumbing it down.”
  • Activity: Develop and workshop a short public-facing pitch for a current research project, tailored to a specific audience and purpose.

• Writing with Community Partners, 90 minutes

  • Description: Community-engaged research requires different writing practices than research conducted primarily for academic audiences. This workshop will help you develop approaches to writing with rather than simply about community partners, with attention to collaboration, reciprocity, audience, and the circulation of research beyond the university.
  • Activity: Map the people, relationships, and forms of writing involved in a current or prospective community-engaged project, then develop a plan for how writing can support collaboration across the project.

Grant Writing Workshop, February 18th, 2026

This workshop introduced participants to strategies and resources for selecting available funding opportunities and writing better grants and fellowship applications.

Producing Literary Exhibitions, March 9th, 2026 and August 17, 2026

This two-session workshop reflected on the production of the summer 2026 Harry Ransom Center exhibition “The Worlds of Gertrude Stein,” curated by Dr Sophie Oliver (University of Liverpool). Emerging from Stein’s ‘personal effects’ collection at the HRC, the exhibition aimed to ask questions about the value of such objects – clothing, stationery and other domestic items – in representing literary lives and work. Contributing both to the development of ‘The Worlds of Gertrude Stein’ and to a growing body of research on literary exhibitions (more often called ‘library exhibitions’ or ‘archival exhibitions’), this two-part workshop led by Dr Oliver considered what such exhibits can do with their objects.

Oral Histories, March 30th, 2026

Dr. Jackie Pedota is a current postdoctoral associate at UT Austin and incoming assistant professor of higher education at UMass Boston. Dr. Pedota's research broadly examines how educational access and opportunity are shaped within racialized institutional contexts and constrained by restrictive policy environments. She leverages critical theories and expertise in qualitative methods to illuminate the mechanisms that reinforce and reproduce racial hierarchies in higher education. 

This workshop guided participants through the full lifecycle of an oral history project, from shaping a clear purpose and selecting an appropriate archive to ethically collecting, preserving, and sharing interviews. Participants learned best practices for community outreach, building trust, and reflecting on positionality and power, while grounding their work in Oral History Association principles, consent, and institutional requirements such as IRB. The session covered practical strategies for preparing and conducting trauma-informed interviews, managing documentation and metadata, ensuring high-quality recordings, and responsibly archiving interviews and related materials for long-term stewardship. Finally, the workshop explored meaningful dissemination, including publishing considerations, public platforms, educational uses, and ways to return oral histories to the communities that made them possible.

Project Management, April 20th, 2026

This workshop equipped participants with practical tools for leading collaborative projects with clarity, efficiency, and shared expectations. Through interactive sessions, participants learned how to set communication norms, define roles and responsibilities, manage tasks and timelines, and support effective teamwork across different levels (PIs, project managers, graduate students, and undergraduates). By the end of the training, participants produced a mini project charter and a backwards-designed project roadmap, providing a clear framework for decision-making, quality control, progress monitoring, and navigating challenges throughout the project lifecycle.

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