AGHI is excited to celebrate a new project in collaboration with St. Andrews University: the Interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Network. This effort brings together doctoral students under JHU’s Humanities Institute and St. Andrews’ new Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies. Here is the first update from the participants:

“The first meeting of the newly established AGHI Johns Hopkins University/GSIS University of St Andrews Interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Network (AGHI/GSIS) took place on Thursday 16 November 2023. Fourteen postgraduate research students from across the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies at St Andrews met each other for the first time in what is the first step in this cross-institutional collaboration. Connecting researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds within St Andrews and across institutions, the project aims to facilitate exchange about the shared experience of working with interdisciplinary research. This became clear already at this first hybrid ‘lunch/afternoon tea’ meeting (at 12.00pm Baltimore and 5.00pm local time) where students had the opportunity to briefly introduce their PhD research and to discuss future directions of the network. Amongst long-term plans of investigating opportunities of establishing a visiting scholars exchange, the group discussed a shared vision for what they would like the network to be. Collaborations in the form of planning a cross-institutional conference on interdisciplinarity, online workshops on methodology and terminology, or a buddy peer-review system for students’ work were ideas that the cohort discussed. Overall, the students of the AGHI/GSIS network, in the words of deputy director of the Graduate School Dr Walter Pedriali, “are trailblazers” in how they will contribute to structurally embedding interdisciplinary research and collaboration at doctoral level at the University of St Andrews and Johns Hopkins University. The next official meeting of the network is planned for late-January, however students unanimously agreed to get work started as soon as possible.”

We look forward to even more updates from this amazing interdisciplinary, cross-continental endeavor!