NEH AWARDS CHALLENGE GRANT TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

A $441,600 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will help the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences offer new opportunities for interdisciplinary study to students in the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art. The grant, which requires the College to raise matching funds of $1.76 million, will provide an endowment and bridge funding for curricular innovation, graduate fellowships, museum and library internships and visits by distinguished scholars.

In the application to the NEH, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dale Kinney noted that humanities "are a traditional strength at Bryn Mawr College." The goal of the Graduate Group is "to offer a form of graduate education that prepares future scholars and teachers to shape the intellectual landscapes of the next generation, without losing the rigor of inquiry and values that have shaped the traditional disciplines for which we are known."

The grant and matching funds will support four initiatives, designed to enrich graduate training in the three disciplines represented in the Graduate Group with distinctive multidisciplinary opportunities:

• Two generous new fellowships for graduate students who wish to work in more than one discipline.
  
• Interdepartmental graduate seminars on shared topics or critical theories.
  
• Visits by distinguished scholars whose research embraces multiple areas of specialization.
  
• An internship program that will collaborate with several Philadelphia-area museums to educate students in the analysis and care of material culture.

The Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, the Department of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies, and the Department of History of Art make up the Graduate Group. The three departments "have always been collegial and have a history of interdisciplinary collaboration," said Kinney. The relationship among the departments was formalized with the creation of the Graduate Group in 2002. With a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the group has since undertaken several projects, including the development of two very successful interdepartmental seminars. The new funding for curricular innovation will give faculty members time to prepare and teach new interdepartmental seminars and other multidisciplinary instruction and events, as well as time for one faculty member to direct the group's programs.

Participation in at least one interdepartmental seminar, or G-Sem, will be a requirement for all Ph.D. students in the Graduate Group beginning with the entering class of 2004.  Kinney observed that "a few students will have the skills and the ambition to do more than this, distributing their coursework more evenly among two departments or even all three. We wish to attract such exceptional students by offering special fellowships targeted to those with the necessary preparation." The fellowships will be 12-month rather than nine-month awards, so students can use the summer months to make progress in demanding combinations of disciplines.

The year-long internships in object- or material-based study will take advantage of Bryn Mawr's own strong collections of art and artifacts as well as the rich concentration of collections and curatorial expertise throughout the Philadelphia region. Each year, two advanced graduate students will intern both at Bryn Mawr and at a partner institution, with the understanding that they will share their newly acquired knowledge with other students, both graduate and undergraduate, through mini-seminars or demonstrations.

The final initiative will support visits by distinguished scholars who will be in residence for up to a semester — long enough, Kinney said, to become familiar with individual students and their work. Visitors, who might include curators as well as scholars, would be chosen by the group's director and steering committee, in consultation with students and faculty.

"With these new initiatives, we will be better able to teach our graduate students about the common roots of the disciplines of archaeology, classics and history of art in the study of western civilization," said Kinney. "We hope to instill awareness of and respect for the subject matter of other disciplines, as well as complementing classroom instruction with hands-on experience of artifacts and other nonverbal modes of expression."

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