Student researchers from three continents will gather at Hope College during the third conference of the Undergraduate Network for Research in the Humanities (UNRH), a consortium founded by seven students, including one from Hope.
The conference, taking place on Friday-Sunday, Feb. 16-18, will host more than 30 participants from throughout the United States as well as Canada, Nigeria and Pakistan who will be considering the theme “InterHumanities: The Importance and Challenges of Interdisciplinary, Inter-institutional and International Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research.” It will feature presentations on 19 research projects by students at 15 colleges and universities.
The conference will include three events on Saturday, Feb. 17, that will be open to the general public: presentations on selected research projects from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.; a keynote address on the conference’s theme at 1 p.m. by Dr. Jacob Heil, who is the College of Wooster’s digital scholarship librarian and director of its Collaborative Research Environment; and poster sessions running from 2:30 p.m. until 4 p.m.
All of the public sessions will take place in Winants Auditorium of Graves Hall. Admission is free.
Recent Hope graduate Taylor Mills was one of the seven undergraduates from colleges and universities around the country who co-founded the UNRH in 2015 to engage students as colleagues in sharing their research and collaborating on how to enhance the research experience.
“We created UNRH to advocate and provide opportunities for undergraduates to present their independent scholarship — particularly in the digital humanities — and to meet other students from different institutions, backgrounds and countries,” she said. “Since our first conference in November 2015, we have accepted over 50 projects, involving over 80 undergraduates from 31 institutions.”
Mills, who graduated from Hope in 2017, became involved in research through the college’s Andrew W. Mellon Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities, which since 2010 has involved students in original research guided by faculty mentors and with an emphasis on using digital tools to develop and share their work. Today she is working with the program as its Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, with her role including helping to organize the UNRH conference.
Along with the sessions open to the public, the conference will feature events for the registered student participants including workshops on topics such as website building, and social media and social justice; a panel discussion; and networking activities. The student research presenters will include Hope senior Nia Stringfellow of Frankfort, Illinois, a Mellon Scholar who will present “The Man Who Wore Red.”
The conference’s sponsors include Davidson College, Hamilton College, Hope College, Washington and Lee University, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH). In addition to Mills, the UNRH founders included students from Antioch College, Cornell College, Davidson College, Grinnell College, and Washington and Lee University.