Grant Recipients Announced
Reciprocity & Redistribution in Action Grant Recipients to Support Graduate Summer Internships
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the Reciprocity & Redistribution in Action grant! The grant supports paid summer internship programs with a local community organization for Ph.D. students in the humanities, arts, and related fields.
University of Iowa: Obermann Humanities Without Walls Graduate Student Internship
Lauren Burrell Cox
The Obermann Humanities Without Walls Graduate Student Internship program will partner with three Iowa City-based nonprofits for summer internships: Public Space One, a nonprofit arts organization; Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County, a community-based, family-centered human services agency that works in local neighborhoods and schools; and the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation, a passionate advocate for the Iowa City Public Library that fosters community enrichment through fundraising, advocacy, and volunteer support. In addition to working with their nonprofit partners, students will participate in training and cohort meetings led by Obermann staff designed to prepare them for a range of careers. This program builds on partnerships established through the Obermann Center's Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good program and the HWW-funded Faculty Externship on Graduate Career Diversity.
Marquette University: Capacity Milwaukee Summer Fellowship
Maggie Nettesheim-Hoffmann, Alisha Klapps Balistreri, Benjamin Linzy, and Emilio De Torre
Marquette University’s Humanities Center will host the Capacity Milwaukee Summer Fellowship in summer 2026 to enhance nonprofit organizational research and methods of collaboration in Milwaukee through the development of a humanities-based research practice partnership model. The summer research model will be co-designed between Marquette University staff, graduate student researchers, and community non-profit partners building a mutually beneficial experience for the student, nonprofit host, and university. The fellows will collaboratively co-design their research projects with their placement site organization, co-designing a collaborative research project based on the needs of the nonprofit organization, and the university will provide courtesy assignments to the nonprofit organizations providing full access to campus and the research library during the duration of the summer fellowship.
Minnesota: Grounded Knowledge
Yuichiro Onishi, Bianet Castellanos, Juliet Burba, and Amanda Steepleton
Grounded Knowledge is a graduate student summer internship program rooted in communities of struggle, where the ethos and framework for reciprocity and redistribution are put into practice to animate dynamic knowledge production. The program builds upon a distinct culture of community engagement at the University of Minnesota's Liberal Arts Engagement Hub (The Hub). Since 2022, The Hub has incubated relationships with local organizations, especially those enmeshed in social justice struggles. These relationships leave The Hub uniquely positioned to co-create public humanities internships that will benefit the organizations and their communities, while opening opportunities for graduate students in the humanities to engage with historical injustices that pulsate in the present. In addition to a 10-week summer internship, students will engage in the following three “grounding sessions” to strengthen our collective commitments to banding together in the service of constructing a new language of struggle and aligning our work with HWW’s directives and methodologies centered on reciprocity and redistribution.
In addition to a 10-week summer internship, students will engage in the following three “grounding sessions” to strengthen our collective commitments to banding together in the service of constructing a new language of struggle and aligning our work with HWW’s directives and methodologies centered on reciprocity and redistribution: (1) an orientation workshop with participating community organizations in April 2026; (2) a summer midpoint gathering to share advances made and challenges experienced in July 2026; and (3) a closing roundtable to discuss outcomes, successes, challenges, and learnings in late August 2026.
University of Michigan: Reciprocal Humanities
Jason Young and Sheri Sytsema-Geiger
“Reciprocal Humanities” is a collaborative effort between the Institute for the Humanities and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, in partnership with local community organizations. The program will mutually benefit graduate students and our partner organizations in several ways. It will provide much-needed summer support to graduate students in the humanities on projects that emphasize the collaborative, community-based ethics at the core of the Reciprocity and Redistribution program. The partnership will give graduate students vital access to cohort and community-building opportunities through various professional development activities, including specialized training for working both inside and outside academia. Additionally, our partnerships with local organizations are designed to focus on value-added, ethical collaboration grounded in larger ethic of care and reciprocity.
Penn State: Public Humanities Community Outreach Internship Program
John Philip Christman and Elizabeth Gray
The Penn State Humanities Institute will use the R&R in Action grant to support summer internships for graduate students enrolled in our Public Humanities Fellows program working in partnership with community associations and groups to produce media products useful to those groups in their own public outreach missions. Building on the PHF structure, students will extend their working relationships with partners from their fellowship year into the summer and continue to contribute concretely to the operation and mission of the organization by completing projects identified by the partners from a humanities perspective and specifically emphasizing social justice themes.
University of Illinois: Summer Bridge Program
Antoinette Burton and Emily Clark
In the HRI Summer Bridge program, PhD students in the humanities at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will participate in community-based projects designed to serve local non-profit organizations while learning new skills and exploring possible career paths adjacent to or beyond the academy. Bridge students will spend 8 weeks in the summer working to help advance the agendas of partners in the Champaign-Urbana area. With support from HWW and campus public engagement professionals, participants will connect with an organization, identify an area of need, and design a project to address that need. Students will be part of a cohort which meets regularly with the Bridge team, who will guide them through their experience and work with the partner organizations to help ensure that the principles of reciprocity and redistribution are working in practice. The Bridge team will conduct assessments of the student and partner experiences. This program offers a funded and facilitated opportunity for PhD students in the humanities to put their skills to work in non-academic settings and to contribute their time and labor to a local organization in ethical, non-extractive ways. The goal is to develop an appreciation for how their graduate training translates into a community work context and to witness first-hand the possibilities and challenges of non-profit employment.
Published December 2, 2025