Democratizing the Humanities: Exploring St. Kate’s work with the Mellon Foundation
By Mia Timlin
This February, St. Kate’s announced in a press release that the university would be one of 26 participating institutions in the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning Grant Program. According to the Mellon Foundation, the grant works with organizations that “nurture advanced humanistic inquiry and social justice” with the intent to “broaden our understanding of American history and culture; develop the interpretive tools and methods scholars use to create meaning; support faculty and students whose work exemplifies a drive toward greater equity in their fields and institutions; and promote pathways for those seeking to exercise transformative academic leadership.”
The opportunity is the result of a proposal written by Dr. Taiyon J Coleman, associate professor of Literature, Language and Writing; Dr. Kristen Lillvis, the Mary Alice Muellerleile ‘60 Endowed Chair in English and Dr. Rachel Neiwert, associate professor of History. Their proposal brings forward the Democratizing the Humanities project, which aims to develop an intersectional curriculum at St. Kate’s that “promotes anti-racism at the university and beyond.”
“We’re working in the arts and humanities, but really in partnership with departments and colleges all across the institution to make our curriculum anti-racist,” says Lillvis. “Each year we’ll have 10 faculty that we team with and 10 students who will help determine what that anti-racist curriculum should be. [They] will assess and make sure that we’re doing that work and then bring it to a reality.”
The semester may have just started, but the work with the Mellon Grant—which is halfway through the first of three years—is already in full swing, and really began over the summer.
“We did a three-day intensive anti-racist pedagogy training [for the faculty involved],” says Lillvis. “From there we were asked to think about what we would do in our classes and to provide evidence of how we’re doing work in our classes. For some people that has been rethinking particular assignments and making sure that those are considered in terms of anti-racism. For some people it’s been thinking about the syllabus more broadly, which is not just the work that is assigned for students to read or engage with, but even just how a course is structured.”
Since the grant is a three-year program, the work on the curriculum is divided into sections by year, with a focus on first-year programs happening now, second- and third-year courses next year and then a combined humanities senior seminar in the final year.
The authors of the Mellon Grant proposal: (left to right) Dr. Taiyon Coleman, Dr. Kristen Lillvis, Dr. Rachel Neiwert
The project and the changes being made to the curriculum rely heavily on a process of collaboration, with input from both faculty and students within the university. It also leans on input from broader community organizers, who are outside of St. Kate’s and serve on an external advisory board to help identify “the needs of the time,” according to Lillvis.
“Sometimes the students have given us feedback on who we might suggest as a community advisor,” says Lillvis—just a facet of the ways students are and can be involved in this project.
Naomi Stewart ‘24 (English) is one of the students doing work with the Mellon Grant. “There’s going to be interns throughout the entire [three years],” says Stewart. “There’s TAs doing work in the classrooms right now, and there’s others working on developing new courses with different resources that have been gathered in the past.”
Both Lillvis and Stewart stressed the importance of student voices being present within these changes.
“The idea is that students would be able to come to different people on the Mellon Grant and offer what they want to see in the course,” Stewart says. “What they would like to see for a diverse curriculum.”
Stewart says that a dedicated place on the website where students can voice their input is currently being developed, and will hopefully be ready for use by December.
While the hope is that the efforts made toward intersectionality and anti-racism curriculum will spread to other aspects of higher education at St. Kate’s, it makes sense to Lillvis that the work should start in the arts and humanities.
“We know that when people read fiction, the same parts of their brain that activate when they have an experience,” she says. “The same parts of your brain that activate when you swim activate when you read about swimming. The content that we absorb—whether it’s reading a book or it’s being online or it’s looking at art—does make a difference in how we exist in the world. Many of us and our students are creators, so we’re putting work out into the world for people to engage in, and so I think we have a responsibility to be thoughtful about that work and make sure that work is inclusive and anti-racist.”
