Mellon-ISLA Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Workshops

Thanks to the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ISLA is able to facilitate the engagement of graduate students in interdisciplinary research and dialogue.

The Mellon grant enables ISLA to fund interdisciplinary workshops—conceived and coordinated by and for graduate students—in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Most workshops consist of monthly meetings during the academic year, but they may also be organized as a concentrated event taking place over the course of one or two days.

The goals of these workshops are multifold: to facilitate interdisciplinary inquiry; expand the range of graduate students’ intellectual peers to include scholars both within and beyond their own disciplines; provide a venue for students to present their work; introduce the methodologies and concepts of other disciplines; and encourage intellectual leadership and collaborative research.

Though students will define their proposed workshop’s central tasks differently, the conception, organization, and execution of these workshops will help graduate students to cultivate the professional skills necessary to develop into productive, active scholars. The graduate student coordinators for each workshop will receive a stipend of $2,000.


The topics of the workshops for AY 2011–12 are:

  • “Religious Freedoms, Modern Contexts," coordinated by John McCormack (History) and David Lantigua (Theology). This workshop will draw graduate students from various Arts and Letters departments and the Law School to discuss the past, present, and future of religious freedom in its political, legal, theological, and social dimensions.
  • “Medieval Studies Interdisciplinary Working Group," coordinated by Bretton Rodriguez (Ph.D. in Literature) and Anna Larsen (Medieval Institute). This workshop will explore interdisciplinarity in medieval studies in monthly meetings at which a faculty member and a graduate student will present their work on complementary topics from different disciplinary perspectives.
  • “The Political Economy of K-12 Education Reform," coordinated by Michael Jones (Economics) and Michael Hartney (Political Science). This workshop will feature presentations by education-focused political scientists, economists,and education researchers, to cultivate discussion among Notre Dame graduate students in the social sciences on the pressing issue of American education reform.
  • “Workshop on Philosophy and History,” coordinated by Anik Stanbury (Medieval Institute). This workshop will focus on the differences among particular historical approaches to philosophy and consider the larger question of the relationship between the history of philosophy and philosophy as an a-historical pursuit.

ISLA will accept workshop proposals from advanced graduate students every spring semester for the following academic year. The application deadline for proposals for AY 2012-13 workshops is February 17, 2012.  Application instructions are posted here.