American studies student selected as a National Humanities Without Walls Doctoral Fellow

LAWRENCE — Marilyn Ortega, doctoral student in American studies, has been selected as a National Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Pre-doctoral Fellow for 2017. HWW is a consortium of humanities centers at 15 research universities throughout the Midwest and beyond, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Humanities Without Walls aims to creative new avenues for collaborative research, teaching and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation.

Ortega will join a 30-person cohort at the Alternative Academic Career Summer Workshop for Pre-Doctoral Students in the Humanities, facilitated and directed by the Chicago Humanities Festival. These workshops aim to help prepare doctoral students for careers both within and outside the academy.

There, Ortega will engage in intensive discussions with organizers of public humanities projects, leaders of university presses and learned societies, experts in the various domains of the digital humanities, representatives of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and holders of important non-faculty positions in colleges and universities.

Ortega was drawn to the summer workshop for “its emphasis on helping scholars that will be looking to join the public humanities and private sector…I will be better equipped to continue bridging between the community and academia in a sustainable way that can benefit both my home communities and my academic communities for years to come.”