THE RICE SEMINARS

The Rice Seminars Program is an initiative of the Dean of Humanities, funded by the Provost’s Office, the School of Humanities, and the Humanities Research Center. The Rice Humanities Research Center will administer the program. The Seminars are designed to promote humanistic research, broadly understood, by bringing together a select group of up to six external faculty fellows from outside of Rice, four Rice faculty members, and two Rice graduate students to study a common theme from several disciplinary perspectives.

The most visible goal of the seminar will be scholarly publications by the participants, including an edited book to which all participants will contribute. Equally important but less visible will be the creation of international and interdisciplinary scholarly communities that will outlive the seminar itself. After the year in residence, seminar participants will attend two follow-up meetings over the next year primarily aimed towards completing the book publication or some other appropriate outcome. Rice will fund these meetings, although the meetings could conceivably be held somewhere else. Current funding will allow us to sponsor the first Rice Seminar in AY 2012-13 and the second in AY 2013-2014. Using these two seminars as models, we have already begun plans to seek permanent funding to continue the program indefinitely. 

The 2012-13 inaugural Rice Seminar has been announced:

Human Trafficking Past and Present: Crossing Borders, Crossing Disciplines. The deadline for participant applications has passed; we plan to announce the awards in early March.

If you would like more information on the Rice Seminars, please contact Lauren Kleinschmidt at the Humanities Research Center.