UBC-V’s Public Humanities Hub began as a three-year pilot project in 2019 to foster and support collaborative research and to highlight and develop public-facing research in the Humanities in Arts, Law, and Education, at UBC-V.
UBC-V’s Public Humanities Hub is the result of wide consultation with UBC Humanities researchers beginning over a decade ago. It has been developed to provide support fitting the nature of collaborations within the Humanities. This pilot was designed by former Associate Dean of Research (Arts) Matthew Evenden and an advisory group, in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Education, and the Peter A. Allard School of Law, and with the support of the offices of the President, the Provost and VP-Academic, and the VP-Research and Innovation. The Public Humanities Hub supports a number of Research Excellence strategies identified in UBC’s Strategic Plan, including Strategy 6: Collaborative Clusters; Strategy 7: Research Support; Strategy 9: Knowledge Exchange; and Strategy 10: Research Culture.
The Public Humanities Hub is supported by annual funding from VP-Research and Innovation, the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Education, and the Peter A. Allard School of Law, and by grants from SSHRC, UBC Work Learn, Mitacs, the Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP), and the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada (ICTC).
How We Work
The Public Humanities Hub works through the guiding verbs:
INCUBATE. COLLABORATE. COMMUNICATE. ADVOCATE.
The Hub is imagining the future of Humanities knowledge creation and dissemination that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, community-engaged, sustainable, inclusive, accessible, and technologically supported. The Hub is committed to Open Scholarship, Open Data, and Open Code.
UBC-Vancouver’s Public Humanities Hub aims to serve as the “hub” for Humanities researchers at UBC.
The Hub will foster incubation by:
- Giving faculty course-release time to develop projects Public Humanities Fellowships
- Supporting research networks
- Assisting Humanities faculty in developing grant applications.
The Hub will cultivate collaboration by:
- Facilitating research collaborations among UBC-V’s Humanities scholars as well as between UBC-V’s Humanities scholars and colleagues at other institutions through Research Cluster funding
- Developing relationships with partner organizations
- Enabling UBC-V Digital Humanities scholars to access infrastructure that supports collaborative work with research partners.
The Hub will enable and inspire communication by:
- Sponsoring a Speaker Series at which visiting speakers, members of research clusters, and Public Humanities Scholars share their research with UBC audiences and with the general public
- Co-sponsoring conferences at UBC-V, with UBC-O, and beyond
- Assisting Public Humanities Fellowship winners with communication plans Public Humanities Fellowships.
- Delivering a Public Scholarship Series and toolkits to help scholars learn how to communicate the results and insights of their research with general audiences in alternative genres.
The Hub will promote advocacy by:
- Lobbying for formalized recognition at UBC (like Tenure and Promotion and the awarding of Merit) of the value of public-facing research and community engagement.
- Encouraging departments to revise Annual Report templates and departmental merit guidelines
- Celebrating the value of Humanities training for students who, when they graduate, become the “general public.”