History of IPRH
- Overview
- Advisory Committee
- Fellows
- Conferences
- Panels, Speakers, and Other Events
- Film Series
- Arts Initiatives
- Reading Groups
- Co-sponsorships
- The Odyssey Project
Reading Groups
Since the 2000-2001 academic year, the IPRH has provided financial and administrative support to faculty and graduate student Reading Groups. These Reading Groups, which may be formed around any topic, meet regularly and frequently sponsor speakers, conferences, and other public events. The IPRH has supported nearly 250 different groups (many of them multi-year or ongoing), organized by faculty, academic professionals, and graduate students from every college, school, and program on campus.
The IPRH entertains proposals each spring for Reading Groups that will meet during the following academic year. Reading Groups may be formed around any topic or theme, and need not be coordinated with the IPRH theme for the year. Reading Groups should aim to foster collaborative study in the humanities, and to investigate questions of sufficient breadth to draw scholars from a reasonably diverse array of academic traditions.
Since the inception of the IPRH Reading Groups initiative in 2000-2001, the program has undergone some transformations. The earliest incarnation of the program awarded a large amount of funding to a small number of groups (five or six in the first couple of years). It soon became apparent that most of these groups were not able to organize the ambitious slates of public events that they had originally proposed; we attributed this to the fact that numerous visits by external scholars, symposia, and other public programming take a considerable amount of time and staffing to accomplish. This arrangement also meant that many of the groups that applied for funding were declined, because the larger awards were extremely competitive. All of this led to a serious reconsideration of the goals of this initiative, and a redefinition of the IPRH Reading Groups program. Thus, for the past several years, we have offered comparatively smaller amounts of money to a much larger number of groups – in effect, multiplying the number of groups, and potential participants, many times over.
Read descriptions of the current year’s IPRH-supported Reading Groups.