The work of the humanities is critical to living in a world that is increasingly interdependent, complex, and often mysterious.  Humanities scholarship has historically been a individualistic endeavor. Twenty-first century approaches and technologies have the potential to help it expand to become much more collaborative and interdisciplinary.

The Humanities Collaboratory — funded by the Provost’s Office and under the administrative umbrella of the Institute for the Humanities — provides resources for humanities scholars to experiment with collaborative, team-based, intergenerational approaches to humanities research, its communication to the broader public, and the training of the next generation of humanities scholars. The projects supported by the Collaboratory explore human communities from the contemporary to the classical, and from the United States to the nations of Africa. Through this work we better understand ourselves, our needs, and our aspirations, and equally important, we better understand these needs and aspirations in others.

Led by humanities faculty, teams including other university faculty, librarians, humanists, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdocs work together on large-scale projects from development to dissemination as they create team-based project models that have the potential to change the ways humanities scholars do their work as a field.