Jacqueline Tackett, a graduate student in German Studies has received a 2021 National Humanities without Walls Pre-Doctoral Career Diversity Workshop Fellowship (link) after having been selected as Cornell’s candidate for the national Humanities Without Walls competition in a nomination process conducted through the Society for the Humanities (link).
Fellows receive a stipend and usually are invited to travel to Chicago for the Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop. This year the workshop will take place online.
The summer workshop allows doctoral students to learn about careers outside of the academy and/or the tenure track system: in the private sector, the non-profit world, arts administration, public media and many other fields.
Humanities without Walls, which received three successive grants from the Mellon Foundation, is a consortium of humanities centers and institutes, based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Humanities without Walls is dedicated to the idea of practice-oriented learning and to the broader idea of “public humanities.” Moreover, this initiative is committed to the work of racial and social justice in the context of career diversity programming.
As a HWW Fellow, Jacy will spend three intensive weeks exploring professional opportunities that aligned with her core values of community service, lifelong learning, and activism. At the Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop, she plans to explore how the questions at the heart of her dissertation research on agency, futurity, and empathy in postwar and contemporary German science fiction provide vocabularies and frameworks for approaching a diverse field of non-tenure track careers too.
Exploring the impact of the humanities outside of traditional academic careers will build on Jacy’s commitment to community engagement, which she has demonstrated through volunteer work with Cornell’s Empathy, Assistance, and Referrals Service (link) and Cornell Graduate Students United (link). She is excited to refine her core interests and think creatively about how humanistic training can help her and her cohort create a more equitable future.
