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Stanford
Public Humanities
School of Humanities and Sciences

Past HIC Events

2023-2024 Events 

2022 Fall 

  • 10/25 (Wednesday) at noon in Old Union 215: "Crafting Your Narrative in Academia"Have you ever been asked, Tell me about your work, and you are not quite sure how to answer the question? In this workshop, we will explore these scenarios, choose some key points we wish to communicate, and identify the various audiences we may encounter on our academic path. You’ll walk away with a 1-minute answer for a few scenarios and a chance to practice with your peers.  
  • 11/14 (Tuesday) at noon, TBD: "Crafting Your Narrative for Opportunities Beyond Academia" PhD students are faced with a challenging academic job market and myriad career choices beyond academia. How might we identify and articulate the knowledge, skills, and approaches we can contribute to other spaces? How do we tell the story of our work to various audiences for various opportunities? In this workshop, we will explore translating our breadth of academic and other experiences into the language of domains beyond academia. You will leave with a starting analysis of some key experiences and a story to tell for a particular audience outside of academia that you may encounter.

2022-2023 HIC Events

2022 Fall

  • September 29. Welcome Back Dinner
  • October 13. What Is A Dissertation and How Do I Write One? A panel discussion with advanced Ph.D. candidates about the process of planning and writing a dissertation. We've recruited four late-stage PhD candidates to share their honest experiences, including the support that they did and did not receive from Stanford, and what they wish they had known before starting: Victoria Zurita (Comparative Literature), Claudius Kim (History), Esiteli Hafoka (Religious Studies and COLLEGE), and Maciej Kurzynski (EALC).
  • October 28. Writing Your Professional Narrative. A writing workshop led by Prof. Roanne Kantor from the Department of English. This workshop has its origins in our discussion at last year's "Navigating the Academic Job Market as a Scholar of Color" event and has been widely anticipated since then. It takes its starting point in Taymiya Zaman's essay 'Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance' and Tanuj Solanki's 'The Geometric Gaze', to be read in advance. In the workshop, participants will first do some brainstorming on the moments in which academia forces us to stand in a particular professional narrative (recruitment, project proposal, fellowship applications, and jobs). When does academia occlude our actual narratives in favor of the narrative we seem to "fit"? What do the histories of our fields and methods say about our subject positions? Participants will then take some time to write about a moment either when these narratives played out or when they experienced the kind of splitting that Zaman discusses.
  • November 12. Happy New Year Screening with BCAS. A screening of Happy New Year 新年快樂, a short film by Elaine Lai, a HIC member, followed by discussion and brunch. According to Elaine, “this film was made in response to the rise in anti-Asian violence around the Stanford and greater Bay area during the pandemic and in hopes that it could foster more nuanced and complex conversations on how to continually commit to compassion in a world that is endlessly violent. I'd love to start those conversations in the communities at Stanford that I feel most aligned with and who care about nonviolence and, in particular, spreading awareness about AAPI hate.”

2023 Winter

  • January 20. Welcome Back Mixer with BCSC (Black Community Service Center)
  • February 1. Lunch with Kelly Nguyen. An intimate and candid lunch conversation with Dr. Kelly Nguyen, IDEAL Provostial Fellow and Stanford alum. Dr. Nguyen has quite a wild set of personal and professional experiences stemming from her identities as a refugee, a Vietnamese woman, and the first woman to graduate from her PhD program at Brown, all within a set of highly traditional fields and institutions. She has also been hugely successful in her academic career to date, despite the challenges she has faced.
  • February 16. Navigating the Academic Job Market as a Scholar of Color. A Panel discussion about the Humanities academic job market from wonderful speakers, Crystal Lee (MIT), Brooke Durham (West Virginia University), Hannah Kim (Macalester College), and Luisa Fernanda Arrieta Fernández (Spelman College). Registered attendees will have exclusive access to a Google Drive folder with materials that the panelists generously agreed to share with us.
  • March 3. Dreaming Bigger Than the Ivory Tower. A conversation with three trailblazing women of color PhDs who are truly living their very best lives after graduating from Stanford in the past few years. Our speakers, Madihah Akhter, Tamara Gilkes Borr, and Courtney Peña, have worked in strategy consulting, DEI, journalism, tech, and research. They'll be talking us through the smartest moves they made in their careers and how they leveraged their PhDs and their campus communities to get to a place where they are living the lives they dreamed of.

2024 Spring
 

  • April 13. Welcome Back Social with A3C (Asian American Activity Center)
  • April 27. Race and Disability in Academia Panel Event. A panel event featuring three distinguished scholars from the School of Education. We'll explore how accessibility issues impact individuals with disabilities in academia and how those issues intersect with race. As many of us hope to pursue our careers in academia, we will also explore how we can change the norms of teaching and learning to promote pedagogical transformation.
  • June 8. End of Year Celebration