We are delighted to feature the research that Fellows worked on during their fellowships at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Send us information on books, prizes, or links to videos and web-based projects that fellowships at the Institute supported and we will gladly add them to the IRH website. We especially welcome copies of books produced with IRH fellowships for our Fellows Library.
Summer Humanities Grant Writing Workshop:
(Held in the summer of 2024 and 2025)
The Institute for Research in the Humanities, with the support of the College of Letters & Science and the Office of Vice Chancellor for Research, held the Summer Humanities Grant Writing Workshop between late June and early August in both 2024 and 2025. The purpose of the workshop was for participants to prepare proposals both for internal university award competitions (the OVCR Fall competition, IRH fellowships, etc.) and for applications to external funding agencies (ACLS, Mellon, Luce, Guggenheim, other discipline-specific bodies, etc.). At the end of the summer, each participant was expected to have a complete proposal (with budget) ready to go for fall deadlines.
Typically 6-8 L&S tenure-track or tenured faculty were selected for this workshop. They met as a cohort at a regular schedule to discuss and compare notes on opportunities and challenges in writing grant proposals, share feedback on their individual proposals, and, at the end of the summer, workshop full drafts of their applications. This in-person workshop was supervised by Steven Nadler, IRH Director (2018–2026), with assistance from other scholars on campus who have been especially successful in winning grants and from other campus resources for expertise on grant applications and planning budgets.
Each member of the workshop received $1500 in flexible research funds.
This fellowship is no longer being offered.
For more information about the program see the full 2025 call for applications here. [Competition closed; link is for reference only.]
For lists of former SHGWW Participants, see our News and Announcements.
Summer Humanities Research Fellowship:
(Held every summer from 2019 to 2023)
The Summer Humanities Research Fellowship program and workshop supported tenured humanities faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in pursuing their “next big project.” It was funded by the College of Letters & Science and the Office of Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (OVCRGE).
Over the course of the summer, these fellowships and accompanying workshop allowed a small cohort of scholars to make progress in the early stages of new book projects or articles. The workshop sought to inspire participants to think programmatically about their research as well as how effectively to pursue external funding to support their scholarship and advance their careers.
This fellowship is no longer being offered.
For more information about the program see the full 2023 call for applications here. [Competition closed; link is for reference only.]
For lists of former SHRF Fellows, see our News and Announcements.
Video Production:
Embodied Knowledge: Sensory Studies in the 21st Century
Embodied Knowledge: Sensory Studies in the 21st Century, a Burdick-Vary Symposium sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) and organized by IRH Senior Fellow Henry John Drewal, features a series of tasty “sound bytes” — short, pithy multi-media presentations by both UW-Madison and internationally-renowned scholars who are exploring the senses in trans-disciplinary research (anthropology, art, art history, visual & material culture, music, dance, performance theory, cognitive sciences, etc.) — interspersed with a variety of “call and response” interactive sensory experiences involving both presenters and audience. Aaron Granat, Associate Lecturer and Video Producer at UW-Madison, filmed and edited the 50-minute video, which is available here.
For a five-minute highlight reel, see below:
Web-based Projects:
(Albrecht Diem, 2010-2011 Solmsen Fellow)
The Monastic Manuscript Project
The Monastic Manuscript Project is a database of descriptions of manuscripts that contain texts relevant for the study of early medieval monasticism, especially monastic rules, ascetic treatises, vitae patrum-texts and texts related to monastic reforms. The site provides lists of manuscripts for each of these texts, which are linked to manuscript descriptions. The purpose is to offer a tool for reconstructing not only the manuscript dissemination of early medieval monastic texts but also to give access to the specific contexts in which a text appears.
The Hildemar Project
Hildemar of Corbie’s Commentary on the Rule of Benedict (ca. 845CE) is a major source for the history of monasticism, but it has long been accessible only in two obscure nineteenth-century editions of its Latin text. The goal of the Hildemar Project is to make the entire commentary more accessible for research and teaching purposes. The first step is to provide a fully searchable version of the Latin text along with an English translation. This translation is a collaborative effort of more than fifty scholars, including specialists in monasticism, Latin, manuscripts studies, and Carolingian history.