5x5 Collaborative Grants

The Humanities Research Center is offering a number of 5×5 Collaborative Grants to encourage faculty in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts to organize around a topic of common interest. This can include a set of readings, an activity, or just an idea which could lead to future research/projects.

How it works

Five faculty meet five times over a period of a few months. Each group will include a minimum of three tenure track faculty and can also include lecturers, full-time instructors, librarians, post-docs, and other university scholars. (This grant is not intended for graduate students.) Ideally, 3 group members will be from CHS. The team organizer should be a member of the tenure-track faculty. While five faculty members is the ideal number, the HRC will consider proposals from teams comprised of four to six members.

Why Apply

These grants will help research faculty carve out some time in an otherwise busy semester to expand your intellectual and institutional networks, explore research questions of interest to you in the context of the linked interests of other faculty, and develop a new kind of scholarly project. The goals of these 5x5 grants include:

1. Encourage collaborative thinking about work in the humanities.
2. Create a space for low-stakes exploration of shared interests.
3. Facilitate the development of collaborative scholarship in the humanities.

Process

Apply by filling out the form below with the following information:

1. a 1-page proposal (which includes the dates and topics for 5 proposed meetings/discussions).
2. a short paragraph describing the group members' individual contributions to the intellectual life of the HRC in the last two years (panels, grant teams, research groups, webinars, Research Fridays, Meet VCU's Authors presentations, mentoring, community engagement work, etc.)

The proposal will be evaluated by the HRC director and members of the Faculty Advisory Board. Each team member of an awarded grant will receive $500 in professional development/research funds upon approval of the group’s application. 

Apply here

Outcome

The group will submit a one-page description of the conversations and the ideas that emerged from the five meetings (1 page) to the HRC director by June 30 of the year of the application, and will agree to be part of HRC Research presentations/workshops in the following academic year. Funds permitting, teams can reapply every 2 years in similar or different group configurations.

Current Group: "Humanistic Horizons: Creating Futures for Higher Learning"

Speculation

The future of the university seems to be in perpetual crisis (for example, Bogost, Boggs & Mitchell, Reitter & Wellmon, Schmidt, Singh). Whether it’s MOOCS, the demographic cliff, or the AI takeover of knowledge work, there is always something on the horizon that presents an existential threat to higher education. This puts academic workers in a defensive posture. We are called upon to think of what the university must be to survive, which leaves little time to think of what it could or should be (Boggs et al).

We are a group of faculty instructors and administrative leaders. Housed in three colleges and Cabell Library, we represent disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives from different parts of campus. As an intellectual community, we want to articulate not just what is worth defending in the academy, but the aspects and ideals of the institution that we actively champion. We share a dedication to the values of humanistic study; we believe that the university is a unique space for critical inquiry, ethical reflection, and democratic engagement.

This working group is designed to carve out time for interdepartmental, intercollegiate, and intergenerational conversations focused on what the future of humanistic study can and should be. We recognize that higher education is at a particular crossroads right now. Between technological advances that are changing what students and employers expect from a college degree and a political landscape that has made university funding and governance a matter of national importance, higher education is navigating challenges both novel and evergreen. Every ideological, political, and economic crisis, no matter the scale, impacts the university and draws our energies away from the truly urgent questions: What do students truly seek from their time here, and how can we help them find meaning, belonging, and agency in their education? What is the role of expertise in democracy? How does university research spur systems change?

As we engage these questions, we will create a shared reading list that represents diverse perspectives on the purpose and future(s) of higher education. It will be grounded in critical university studies scholarship critiquing the university’s inability to live up to the goals of racial democracy and social mobility, while also engaging with conservative critiques that challenge current institutional practices and call for fundamental reforms to higher education.

We will hold 5 meetings around the following themes:

• Futures (October 1st)
• Curiosity (November 7th)
• Democracy (December 3rd)
• Expertise (January 27th)
• Leadership (February 24th)

To prepare for each meeting, each member will read a separate text. We will put the texts in conversation by thinking through what they can tell us about the future of higher education policy, of undergraduate education, of university research, and of study as a social practice.

Our ultimate goal is to create a final product that summarizes these various perspectives and allows stakeholders to speak across ideological divides and political beliefs. We believe it is important to tell the stories not just of what higher education has to be to survive, but also to tell the stories of what higher education could be. We will compile this in a 1-pager for ourselves, and then “translate” these into items that we will share with:

1. Students through an assignment design
2. Faculty through a toolkit of talking points
3. Larger scholarly communities through an OER proposal for Scholars’ Compass

Participants

Ellen Carpenter, Associate Professor & Director of Undergraduate Programs | Department of Psychology, CHS
Dr. Ellen Carpenter earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from Oberlin College, her master's degree in sport psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her doctorate in human factors psychology from Old Dominion University while serving as the head cross country coach. She is highly active in Division 2 of the American Psychological Association (Society for the Teaching of Psychology), having served on a Presidential Task Force and currently serving as the Associate Director of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Workshop at the Annual Conference. She has also recently started competing as a master's track and field athlete.

Ruth Cody, University Archivist | Special Collections and Archives, VCU Libraries
As the University Archivist, Ruth Cody ensures that VCU’s materials and history are collected, preserved, and made available to the public through campus instruction, outreach and programming. She holds a Master of Arts in public history with a focus in archives and information management and a Bachelor of Arts in history, both from North Carolina State University. She recently received her certification as a Timeslips Certified Facilitator so she can lead social and educational story sessions for various communities including students, the elderly, and those with dementia. Because she believes in the power of narrative as a tool for connection and communication, she is currently working on a Graduate Certificate in Storytelling at the University of North Texas. Currently she is writing an article about trends in University Archives and preparing a series of oral stories for participation in the Virginia Storytelling Alliance.

Constance Relihan, Professor | Department of English, CHS
Constance C. Relihan teaches early modern English literature and Shakespeare, with an emphasis on general education and student success. She previously served as Dean of University College at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is also a contributing editor to Academic Leader, where she writes on a range of topics related to academic administration and current issues in higher education, and a former board member of the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities. Prior to her arrival at VCU, she served as the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies at Auburn University and Director of University College. She has been committed to the continuous improvement of the undergraduate academic experience through improving general education, strengthening academic advising, and ensuring that undergraduates are provided with the academic opportunities they need to succeed. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an A.B. in English, and earned both her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota. Her literary research has focused on the structural nature and cultural impact of English prose fiction written during the early modern period. She is currently at work on a large project on the impact of the depiction of universities in fiction on cultural attitudes toward higher education.

Jesse Senechal, Executive Director of ICRE; Assistant Professor, Foundations of Education | School of Education
Dr. Jesse Senechal serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Evaluation (ICRE) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). With more than a decade of experience in educational research and evaluation, Dr. Senechal has led numerous projects aimed at improving educational outcomes across various educational settings. His expertise spans topics such as action research, research-practice partnerships in education, and teacher professional development. Current projects include a developmental evaluation of the Virginia Talent + Opportunity Partnership (V-TOP), a statewide initiative to enhance work-based learning opportunities; a collaborative evaluation of the English Empowerment Center, to support student success for adult English Learners; and the Schaberg New Teacher Support Program which provides induction support for early career teachers in Richmond Public Schools. Recently, Dr. Senechal started the AI in Research Interest Group within VCU’s School of Education, and was a part of the Humanities Research Center’s AI in Education working group in 2024-25. Prior to his work in higher education, Dr. Senechal spent 14 years as a high school English Teacher in Chicago and Richmond City.

Vineeta Singh, Assistant Professor & Program Director | Interdisciplinary Studies Program, University College
Vineeta Singh joined the Interdisciplinary Studies Program and the VCU community in Fall 2021 and began serving as the Associate Director of IDS in spring 2025. She has previously taught at the University of Maryland College Park, the College of William & Mary, and the University of California in Santa Barbara and San Diego. She completed her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2018 with a dissertation historicizing contemporary conversations around 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' in higher ed by placing today’s controversies and confrontations in the context of 400 years of U.S. racial democracy. Her teaching and research are grounded in critical and abolitionist university studies. She serves as Associate Editor of Ethnic Studies Review, a UC Press journal, and is currently curating submissions for a distributed special issue titled “Abolitionist Pedagogies, Pedagogical Labor,” exploring how to build pedagogies, classrooms, and institutions grounded in radical traditions of feminist, queer, abolitionist, and decolonial world-making.

Contributions to the HRC

In the past year, Ruth attended events for the first annual 2024-2025 Humanities Week. Dr. Senechal was a part of the Humanities Research Center’s AI in Education working group in 2024-25. Ellen and Vineeta participated in the spring writing retreat sponsored by the HRC at the Roslyn Retreat Center and Vineeta has sporadically attended online write-on-sites in the past and keeps promising herself that she will be awake and outside the house at 10am the next Friday, but has only once met that goal. Being a part of the Abolition Lab (now the Transformative Justice Learning Collaborative Lab) was a key step in Vineeta finding her intellectual community at VCU.

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