The Humanities Fellows Program, sponsored by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings together faculty members from the School of Business Administration, the School of Education and Allied Professions, the School of Engineering, and the humanities departments of the College of Arts and Sciences for the purpose of faculty collaboration and curricular development. The program is designed to encourage faculty to work across disciplinary boundaries on projects that foster integrated learning and scholarship. While the program seeks primarily to promote curricular innovation, Humanities Fellows are also expected to engage in scholarship related to integrated learning and teaching across disciplines.

The third class of Humanities Fellows, appointed for 2005-07, includes the following projects.

• Ethics and Gender: Peggy DesAutels (Philosophy) and Daniel Farhey (Civil and Environmental Engineering). Drs. DesAutels and Farhey are working with the Dean of the School of Engineering and the Center for Women and Minorities in Engineering to study gender issues affecting women engineering students and faculty. They are also investigating ways to integrate ethical issues concerning gender in their engineering ethics and design courses.
• Undergraduate Research on Environmental Sustainability: Daniel Fouke (Philosophy) and Sukh Sidhu (Mechanical Engineering). Drs. Fouke and Sidhu are designing and team-teaching a year-long course sequence on sustainable development that integrates environmental philosophy with environmental science and technology.  Student teams in the course pursue community-based research on environmental issues in the Miami Valley.
• Ethics as Design: Brad Kallenberg (Religious Studies) and Andrew Murray (Mechanical Engineering). Drs. Kallenberg and Murray are studying isomorphisms between engineering design and ethical reasoning. They audited one another’s courses in engineering ethics and design and are developing a joint, team-taught course in ethics and design to be offered in 2007-08.
• The Language of Science: Monish Chatterjee (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Patricia Johnson (Philosophy). Drs. Chatterjee and Johnson are studying how scientific vocabularies, especially in scientific fields emerging in the 21st century, could be developed in the vernacular languages of India. Their project concentrates on Bengali and the works of S. Bose and R. Tagore in particular. They are revising the Department of Philosophy’s Asian philosophy course and are also developing a proposed education abroad program in Bangalore, India. They have written research proposals to the American Institute for Indian Studies to pursue their project beyond the term of the fellowship.

For descriptions of projects for earlier classes of Humanities Fellows, click here. 

For the 2007-09 fellowship application process, click here. Preliminary proposals are due on January 31, 2007. 

Inquiries about the Humanities Fellows Program should be addressed to Dr. Paul Benson, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, 300 College Park, Dayton, OH 45469-0800 (tel: 229-2602; e-mail: Paul.Benson@notes.udayton.edu).