The UC Davis Humanities Institute provides financial support, space and opportunities for research, reflection, collaborative thinking and mentoring. Competitively selected faculty research seminars bring together mixed disciplinary groups across the humanities and social sciences to explore timely issues and share work-in-progress. Research clusters provide funding and opportunities for faculty and graduate students to create intellectual communities of shared interests around congruent areas or dynamic new fields. Meeting regularly to critique work and host public events, these self-generating, collaborative groups also serve as seedbeds for new programs and other campus initiatives.
DHI2 - the Digital Humanities Initiative at the Davis Humanities Institute - provides a physical and virtual space for digital innovation and collaboration on campus. The primary project for 2009-10 is the Digital Innovation Lab, a three-year initiative to develop new digital tools and environments that grow directly from the research methodologies and challenges faced by humanities scholars. The Lab also provides an institutional infrastructure for a more collaborative mode of producing, publishing, and distributing humanities research, writing, and pedagogy.
The Studies of Food and the Body Multi Campus Research Program, founded in Fall 2008 and hosted at the UC Davis Humanities Institute, brings together faculty and graduate-student scholars in the humanities and social sciences from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz who are exploring the relationship between food, the body and culture. This collaboration has been created to strengthen the work of individual members through works in progress seminars, to draw attention to the critical mass of food scholars on the three northern California campuses, to provide focused mentoring to graduate students in this area, and to open a dialogue between humanities and science scholars, and the public, on food and body concerns.