Course Enhancement Grants

Course Enhancement Grants

COMMENTS FROM PAST FACULTY PARTICIPANTS:

"The Global Urban Humanities Initiative and activities surrounding it have been a highlight of my time at Cal thus far!"

"It was a great chance to come together with colleagues from various disciplines and discuss our different approaches to study and represent urban experience."

GRANTS

The Global Urban Humanities Initiative (GUH) invites faculty teaching graduate or undergraduate courses on cities and urban life to apply for course enhancement grants of $2,000.

In this grant fellowship program, we aim to bring together faculty who teach about cities in a variety of disciplines to workshop syllabi for existing or new courses. The purpose of the workshops is to share ideas for readings, pedagogical techniques, and approaches across disciplines in order to enhance teaching about cities and urban life.  Through these grants, we hope to enhance the interdisciplinary elective course offerings in our Graduate and Undergraduate Certificates in Global Urban Humanities.

Eligible courses can be ones already primarily focused on urban themes, or courses with some urban content in which the instructor wishes to increase the emphasis on cities, space, and place. For courses already focused on cities, participation in the workshops should center on incorporating new approaches outside the proposer’s home discipline.

The fellows will meet in two two-hour workshops to discuss their syllabi and to hear presentations on pedagogical experiments in past GUH courses, in which faculty have developed innovative pedagogical methods through interdisciplinary team teaching, particularly through experiential, fieldwork-based “studio” courses.

We may examine methods including mapping, interviewing, visual representation, and various digital humanities approaches. We welcome proposals from the environmental humanities as they interface with urban issues.

The fellows will each receive $2,000 to be used for any purpose related to the course in question, such as travel, technical training, books, research assistance, guest speakers, etc.

Eligibility: Ladder-rank faculty and lecturers SOE. Applications from all departments are welcomed. Priority will generally go to applicants from the College of Environmental Design, the Arts and Humanities Division, and the interpretive social sciences.

Proposals will be assessed according to three criteria: (1) potential for enhancing the range and depth of courses on cities, urban life, space and place at UC Berkeley (2) potential for introducing interdisciplinary methods to existing courses and (3) interest of the applicant in joining ongoing conversations within the Global Urban Humanities community.

GUH supports the study of cities and urban life by bringing together approaches from the arts and humanities, the interpretive social sciences, and the environmental design disciplines. It is a growing community of faculty and students from 28 departments including Architecture, Art History, Art Practice, City and Regional Planning, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Ethnic Studies, Geography, History, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, Music, Rhetoric, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, etc.

Visit our website to learn about past Global Urban Humanities graduate courses and undergraduate courses can be seen.

GUH is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Please visit the GUH website to learn more about the Initiative.

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