Dear friends,Welcome to another exciting year in CHID! As we reach the final stretch of fall quarter, I wanted to send a quick note to let you know of some important developments in our program and community.Let me start by introducing Caroline Simpson, our newest faculty member who comes to us from the English department. If you know Caroline, you already know how much energy and enthusiasm she brings to CHID. We are so… Read more
I'm writing now from a hotel room somewhere in Cincinnati. I'm on a road trip with my dear friend Beth Fairchild, spokesperson for METAvivor.org. Beth is a huge advocate for metastatic breast cancer research. She is also dying. For the last week I have been road-tripping with her and traveling to different events. Monday there was a fundraiser meet-up, followed by a huge “die-in” rally on the west lawn of the Capitol Building in Washington DC on Tuesday. Last… Read more
This summer I had the privilege of being a 2015 Fellow in the Digital Humanities at the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities. The fellowship brings together 10 scholars to work on projects in the humanities that use digital tools. Over the summer we talk about our ideas, plan our projects, and begin to implement them. The project I designed uses digital tools (html, java script, and Scalar) to explore the relatedness of all types… Read more
This past spring CHID’s academic journal intersections was re-launched as an online magazine. Initiated in 1993, the journal had been out of circulation for several years until Winter 2015, when then-senior Shannon Foss organized a complete revamp of the publication by reaching out to other students in the department. Along with Shannon, five other students formed the first curating team: Nat Mengist, Amelia Batayola, Michael Beach, Alec Sullivan and Mariel Vaca-Cruz.
Through… Read more
CHID program director María Elena García and affiliate faculty member Louisa Mackenzie have been awarded a Collaboration Studio Grant (2015-16) by the UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities. These grants support collaborative work between faculty, often from diverse academic backgrounds, as they catalyze, deepen, or reconfigure cross-disciplinary research and work toward… Read more
Two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica, and Raz Barnea never lived the same day twice. Stationed across the island in the late 2000s, Barnea, who’s currently working toward his law degree at the University of Washington, never knew what a day would bring.
“As a Peace Corps volunteer, you’re sort of always on call,” he says. “That’s what I miss most about Jamaica.
Being on call meant some days were spent forming relationships with the fishermen, diving to study invasive species or… Read more