National Humanities Center Invites Joanna Brooks to Complete Work on an Emergent Humanities Toolkit

Brooks, a visiting scholar-in-residence in spring 2024, will support humanities scholarship nationwide

The National Humanities Center (NHC), a private nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, will host Joanna Brooks, SDSU associate vice president for faculty advancement and student success and English and comparative literature professor, as a visiting scholar in 2024. 

Brooks plans to complete work on an emergent humanities toolkit to support innovation in university-based humanities scholarship, which NHC will publish as a dual digital and printable toolkit for a wide audience of scholars across the U.S. 

Brooks and Pamella Lach, digital humanities librarian and Digital Humanities Center director, previously forged a unique four-year partnership with NHC, which informed the new toolkit project. “We have established SDSU as a national leader in humanities innovation,” Brooks said.

Brooks and Lach created podcasting workshops to train 400+ faculty, postdocs, and graduate students, (at universities ranging from Ivy Leagues to major R1s to HBCUs), in emergent humanities theories and methodologies. 

Specific examples of the resources in the new toolkit include: 

• Stories from leading humanities scholars who have made the jump to new forms of research and scholarship;
• Tools for humanities innovators drawn from design thinking, convergence science, and emergent strategy;
• Support for progressive dissemination and evaluation of humanities research;
• New frameworks for measuring and communicating humanities project impact.

“The goal of my project is to help humanities departments and scholars nationwide to grow a new future:  to become more courageous, confident, and collaborative, to deepen our relationships with the publics who inspire us, and to answer the call for applied and translational work that engages essential and urgent human questions,” she added. “I am honored by the trust NHC has placed in me, and by SDSU’s support for my humanities career.”

Brooks is now interviewing future-facing humanities scholars nationwide and welcomes nominations or voluntary participation.

The NHC is one of ten institutes for advanced study in the world, and the only one fully dedicated to the humanities.