For the past 20 years, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities has provided students, faculty and the Providence community with collaborative and interdisciplinary opportunities to think about the humanities. Founded as the “Brown Humanities Center” in 2003, the Cogut Institute remains a conduit for academic exploration on campus.
As the presence behind a significant portion of humanities-related programming at the University, the institute helped to put on 57 events and conferences over the 2022-23 academic year. After becoming an institute in 2017, the Cogut Institute has drastically expanded its scope, providing students with valuable resources to pursue scholarship in the humanities.
“We are a home and catalyst for collaborative research and curricular innovation in the humanities and in partnership with other disciplines,” said Lecturer in Humanities Damien Mahiet, who is the director of academic programs and acting director of the Cogut Institute for fall 2023. Director of the Cogut Institute and Professor of English and Humanities Amanda Anderson is on sabbatical for fall 2023.
“What we do is create spaces for scholars of all ranks and disciplines to advance their work in conversation,” Mahiet added.
Undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral fellowships
The Cogut Institute first established its presence on campus through the Fellows Seminar, comprised of Cogut Institute Fellows and others in fields across the humanities. “The nucleus of the Institute at its birth was the Fellows Seminar, which is really kind of a unique multi-rank space that is open to all topics,” said Mahiet.
The Cogut Institute now provides yearly fellowships to undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at the University. These fellowships are aimed at providing participants with resources and a collaborative environment to advance their research projects. For undergraduates, the fellowship provides a space to pursue and receive feedback on senior honors theses.
“It’s always striking and fascinating to see the resonances between projects that you don't always expect,” Mahiet said. “You get really attentive, thoughtful feedback from people in different disciplines. … I can personally say that those questions generated in the seminar have stayed with me for a long time and changed my work.”
The fellowships grant participants a stipend to help cover research expenses and the opportunity to participate in weekly collaborative seminars with other fellows. While the number of applications varies each year, Mahiet said selection for the program is always competitive.
Devon Clifton GS is a 2023-24 graduate fellow whose research explores the relationship between Blackness as an object of thought and Blackness as an object of scholarly intervention. She said that the fellowship has been helpful because of the broad scope of her research and her interest in how scholars interact with what they study.
“It’s very interesting to me to look at all the different orientations towards work and studying that people come to the seminar with,” Clifton said.
Maru Attwood ’24, a history concentrator, was selected as a 2023-24 undergraduate fellow. Attwood’s thesis investigates the environmental history of the area where she grew up in rural South Africa. “I’m looking at telling that history through the ways that land became physically divided up into farming and other sorts of boundaries,” she said. “It’s a local history told through fences.”
Before learning about the fellowship, Attwood was unsure how she would fund her summer research. “I was in the process of applying to a couple of grants when I came across the Cogut fellowship,” Attwood said. “I thought that it seemed awesome and was excited about pushing myself within the seminar environment.” She added that the funding provided through the Cogut Institute allowed her to travel to conduct oral interviews and covered a significant portion of her research expenditure.
“I was recently reflecting on the ways that writing a thesis can feel a little lonely,” Attwood said. “Having an environment available where you’re discussing an in-progress project with people who have a lot of different perspectives is quite awesome.”
Attwood urged interested students to apply for the fellowship. “There’s an application process, but it’s not super intensive,” she said. “It's totally worth it.”
Applications for the Cogut Fellows seminar opened on Tuesday, Oct. 10 and will close on Friday, Feb. 23.
Opportunities for academic exploration
The Cogut Institute is home to several centers and initiatives, including the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, the Disability Studies Working Group and the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown, among others.
“Some initiatives are built from the ground up, which is the story behind the Environmental Humanities Initiative or the Disability Studies Working Group, which were projects brought by people from various departments on campus that needed a home,” Mahiet said. “They were developed in conversation and partnership with the faculty, postdoctoral fellows and students on campus.”
Mark Cladis, professor of humanities and religious studies and a member of the Cogut Institute’s governing board at the Cogut Institute, played a vital role in the formation of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities. Cladis said that he and colleagues heard about work being done on the environment from students and wanted to develop a hub for research in the field.
They settled on the Cogut Institute as an ideal host. “We went to talk to the director, Amanda Anderson, and the next thing we knew we had become an initiative,” he said. “We had funding (and) administrative support and we could start a really fantastic lecture series.”
Over the past few years, the Cogut has sponsored courses co-taught by professors from different academic disciplines.
“This semester, there’s a fabulous course that is pairing a historian of art, Lindsay Caplan, and an applied math faculty, Govind Menon — they are looking at the history and theory of form and formalism at the intersection of art and mathematics,” Mahiet said.
Cladis co-taught one of these courses with Professor of Political Science Sharon Krause in spring 2019. The course, HMAN 2400I: “Into the Wild: Thinking Democracy Ecologically,” was a graduate seminar with students from eight different disciplines, he said.
“I was at first worried that it might be a bit of a cacophony, that we wouldn’t have a shared language,” he said. “In fact, the topics cut across all of our disciplines, and we easily found a language to talk through and try to make progress on the various topics of the course.”
“I think it was my best experience of teaching at Brown,” he added.
Looking to the future
In summer 2024, the Cogut Institute will move from Pembroke Hall to the recently renovated Andrews House. The relocation will provide new and valuable space in which the Cogut Institute will continue to expand its programming, Mahiet said.
“A lot of our work now is going into thinking about the physical spaces in which people are going to be,” Mahiet said.
The relocation will also provide more permanent spaces in which fellows can foster a sense of community. “With the move to Andrews House, one of the exciting developments is that the Cogut Institute will be able to offer touchstone spaces to all the fellows,” including shared workspaces, Mahiet added.
“I’ve been at Brown since 2004, and I’ve seen the Cogut really develop in important ways,” Cladis reflected. “The main development I’ve seen in the Cogut is that it is increasingly moving towards the center and the heart of campus.”
“For me, what’s most exciting is when you get faculty, graduates and undergraduates, and members of the community outside of Brown in the same room to talk about things of importance,” Cladis added. “I’m really happy with the way the Cogut Institute has evolved over the years.”
