The Humanities Without Walls (HWW) workshop is designed to help PhD students reimagine their post-doctoral life and consider the skills and networks required to access a career in the public humanities.

The Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) and the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium partner for an ambitious three-week workshop for PhD students in the humanities, focused on professional opportunities both within and beyond the academy. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and launched in 2015, each summer the workshop welcomes thirty participants from higher education institutions across the United States. HWW participants represent a diversity of academic disciplines. Through a series of workshops, talks, and field trips, participants learn how to leverage their skills and training towards careers in and out of the academy, in the private, public and non-profit sectors, arts administration, museums, public media and many other fields. Chicago is the heart of the seminar and the workshop draws extensively on the energy of the city’s rich creative sector.

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) received grants totaling $7.2 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create and sustain the Humanities Without Walls consortium, established in 2013. The consortium aims to promote academic collaboration among the humanities centers of 15 major research institutions in the Midwest and beyond. Consortium members include UIUC, Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska, University of Notre Dame, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.