The Integrating Humanities Initiatives

Academic Year 2026-2027

Professor Jordan Branch

Writing Beyond the Academy: Securing an Agent and a Commercial Book Deal

This one-day workshop with Scholars to Storytellers is an intensive professional development seminar designed to demystify the transition from specialized academic research to commercial trade publishing. The program addresses the structural and stylistic barriers that often prevent rigorous academic work from reaching a mainstream audience. The workshop is led by John Ghazvinian, an academic historian who has published a best-selling trade book on U.S.-Iranian relations. The curriculum includes an introduction to trade publishing, highlighting the differences between academic and commercial presses; guidance on the mechanics of writing a book proposal for a trade press; an introduction to finding the right literary agent; and interactive workshopping and feedback of draft book proposal ideas and writing samples.

Professor Devin Fergus, Professor Lynn Itagaki, RA Kendall Higgins and RA Yena Song

Gender and Capitalism

This project supports three student research assistants to assist with the planning, execution, follow-up, and pre-publication work for a conference on gender and capitalism in U.S. history. Professor Lynn Itagaki and Professor Devin Fergus will serve as conference co-organizers.  Student research assistants will play an integral role in both the intellectual and logistical dimensions of the conference. In the initial stages, students will assist in developing a working bibliography on gender and capitalism in U.S. history. This work will involve identifying key texts, synthesizing core themes, and mapping emerging areas of scholarship. Students will also help identify prospective conference participants and prepare brief background summaries of their work, as well as assist in organizing pre-circulated papers. As planning progresses, students will contribute to the organizational infrastructure of the conference. During the conference itself, student assistants will provide essential on-site support. Following the conference, students will assist with post-conference activities, including organizing and synthesizing notes, refining the working bibliography, and supporting early stages of publication planning. 

professor radhika Koul

Upstream: The Humanities and the Making of AI

This project organizes a series of three practitioner engagement events over AY 2026-27, bringing AI industry professionals into dialogue with CMC faculty and students. The central premise is that the humanities are not merely a corrective to artificial intelligence — a layer of ethical oversight applied after the fact — but a generative force that should shape how AI systems are conceived, designed, and deployed. Making this argument vivid requires putting humanists and practitioners in genuine conversation, which this series does in two registers: public sessions giving career-oriented students direct access to what humanistic thinking looks like inside the AI industry, and faculty-practitioner working dinners in which a small group of CMC faculty engages the practitioner in focused discussion of how humanistic perspectives bear on the decisions they actually face.

The three events move from career identity to intellectual substance to collective reflection. The first focuses on professional pathways, giving students a concrete picture of where and how humanists work inside AI firms. The second engages the decisions, frameworks, and forms of knowledge at stake when AI systems are built and evaluated. The third takes place as part of a faculty-organized conference on narrative neuroscience, with a roundtable of practitioners and scholars exploring what it would mean to embed humanistic values in AI work from the start. Together, the series aims to make the humanities legible as a genuine career asset in the technology sector, advance a substantive intellectual framework for the relationship between humanistic inquiry and AI development, and build a network of practitioner-partners for ongoing curricular and research collaboration.

Professor Tamara Venit-Shelton

HS Cross-Section Collaboration

This project supports cross-section collaborations among First-Year Humanities Seminars (FHS) to spark common colloquy among faculty and students. Through guest speakers, events, salon-style conversations, and other co-curricular experiences, it aims to foster shared insights and a deeper appreciation, especially among first-year students, for the variety and vitality of the Humanities at CMC.