By Ann Marie Deer Owens
Today’s biggest pressing and complex challenges are most effectively addressed through interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives. The Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program (CHPP) fully embodies that approach, bringing together early-career scholars to address important contemporary issues through a critical humanities lens. For the past five years, the program has offered a deeply supportive community for postdoctoral scholars from leading graduate programs nationwide, preparing them to change the future of humanistic study in their respective fields.
A unique, collaborative approach
Postdoctoral scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences receive a three-year fellowship, a rare opportunity. Fellows are affiliated with a home academic department within the College of Arts and Science and also regularly convene and collaborate as a cohort and engage with the wider Vanderbilt community.
“Most postdoc programs are only one or two years in length,” said Julia Phillips Cohen, associate professor of Jewish studies and history and interim director of CHPP. “Our extended term enables the fellows to become colleagues, develop connections across campus, and grow as scholars and teachers. They have the time to be present and engaged in ways not provided by shorter-term scholarships.”
Eric Gurevitch, assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University, was grateful for the support he received as a CHPP fellow from 2022 through 2025. “Many universities offer programs to support doctoral students and junior faculty,” he said. “But few institutions offer a designated group for postdocs unless they are connected with a laboratory in the natural and physical sciences.”
Gurevitch is a historian of science, technology, and medicine in the medieval and early modern periods, with a focus on South Asia and the Indian Ocean. He works on global histories of science in which unexpected voices, practices, and events stand alongside standard narratives. During his fellowship, he was part of a small group of environmental humanists. They collaborated on everything from organizing movie screenings to planning academic seminars and reading each other’s manuscripts. He also benefited from the input of the broader CHPP cohort. “They were the first people I would turn to with new ideas about my research, even if they were not within my specialization,” Gurevitch said. “This helped me learn how to think within the larger humanistic and historical discipline and communicate across those boundaries.”
CHPP is designed for postdocs who are either already conducting interdisciplinary research or who would benefit from engaging with researchers in other disciplines. “The scholars who are pushing the boundaries of their fields are often those who work across disciplines and bring different approaches, both methodologically and theoretically, to their research,” said Tasha Rijke-Epstein, associate professor of history and climate and environmental studies and former interim director of CHPP. “This program has created an important intellectual space for these fellows, which contributes significantly to the university.”
An interdisciplinary origin
Seed funding for the program came from a 2021 $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant targeted at addressing the decline in the humanities job market resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Fittingly, two College of Arts and Science associate deans—a humanist and a scientist—collaborated to design it.
Bonnie Dow, vice dean and senior associate dean for faculty affairs in the college, knew that faculty jobs in the humanities were becoming scarcer, leaving recent Ph.D. students stranded. David Wright, then-dean of research and graduate education for the college and now director of the Program in Communication of Science and Technology, knew that three-year postdocs were the norm in the natural sciences, providing crucial training that set up young scientists well for academic jobs, but rare in the humanities.
Combining their expertise, they came up with CHPP, and the NEH funded it. The program had three priorities from the outset: supporting scholarship, training in pedagogy, and preparing for the job market.
“I have described this program as job training for humanities Ph.D.’s,” Wright said. “It has succeeded well beyond what we envisioned in the dark days of the pandemic.” Dow notes the broader impact of the program. “These postdocs benefit from the mentoring they get from our faculty, but our faculty and students also benefit so much from their intellectual energy and fresh ideas,” Dow said. “They have been such a positive addition to the humanities ecosystem at Vanderbilt.”
Enhancing undergraduate education
“The Vanderbilt humanities postdoc program set me up very well for my tenure-track position at Harvard,” Gurevitch said. “I had some teaching 
experience as a doctoral student but needed more.”
The CHPP program supports the fellows’ rigorous research agenda while also providing teaching opportunities. Fellows gain hands-on classroom experience that makes them better instructors and also have the opportunity to expand curricular offerings by proposing and teaching new courses related to their research interests.
Nathalie Barton, assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, was thankful for the teaching experience she gained as a CHPP fellow from 2024 to 2026. She is a historian of the United States, with a focus on the histories of cities, housing, and race and how they are intertwined. At Vanderbilt, she designed a seminar on race and housing for undergraduates that she will continue to teach at Notre Dame. She also taught a workshop geared toward history majors.
Meredith Degyansky, one of seven fellows who started this fall, looks forward to teaching Science, Technology, and Values, an A&S College Core course for first-year students, in the spring. Her research is focused on the solidarity economy movement—a global movement to build a just and sustainable economy. Degyansky, who earned her doctorate in cultural anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been working with an immigrant-led cooperative land project in Western Massachusetts.
Contributing to campus intellectual life
For Helen Makhdoumian, who began her fellowship in fall 2023, collaboration was a highlight. She is trained in literary studies with a focus on representations of colonial violence and its legacies in North America and the Middle East. Makhdoumian was based in the Department of English, but she worked closely scholars in the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies; the Department of Romance Languages, Cultures, and Diasporas; the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership; and the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies.
“We had a wonderful collaboration with the Nashville International Center for Empowerment—hosting an event for immigrants and refugees to share their stories of navigating new spaces and adjusting to life in Middle Tennessee,” Makhdoumian said. “This was a pivotal moment for us as postdocs in carrying out public-facing humanities work, and I think it was also important for the Vanderbilt community to hear these personal stories. There is the work we do as scholars when we look at library databases or explore archives. But there is also this living community that is present and around us. They enrich us, and hopefully the research that we do can benefit them, too.”
Makhdoumian has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on her book project, tentatively titled Afterwords: Nested Memories and the Forms of Global Indigenous Removals. Now a graduate of CHPP, she is currently a visiting scholar in Vanderbilt’s Department of English.
Fellows have the option to complete a third-year experience, which is shaped around their academic interests. Clara Wilch, a fellow from 2023 to 2026, co-produced a podcast series, “Arctic Representation: Conversations with Inuit Artists.” In another, Peter Chesney, a fellow from 2023 to 2026, helped create an exhibit at the Vanderbilt Museum of Art titled Scent: Connection, Confrontation, Memory, a collaboration with the museum and three A&S classes.
Supportive mentors guide research
CHPP fellows can be mentored by faculty both within and outside of their research specialties. Gurevitch, who was housed in the Department of Asian Studies, was mentored by Samira Sheik, who has appointments in history and Asian studies, and Teresa Goddu, who has appointments in English and climate and environmental studies. “Both were very helpful, and I liked having that extra set of eyes from a faculty member outside of my area,” he said.
During Barton’s last semester, she organized a manuscript workshop with her two mentors—Brandon R. Byrd, associate professor of history and African American and diaspora studies, and Jefferson Cowie, John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History. Also participating were two outside readers and Rijke-Epstein, the program’s then-interim director. “This was a wonderful opportunity to have a gathering of experts read your writing carefully and provide feedback in ways that you don’t usually receive after you leave a doctoral program,” she said. Barton is currently finalizing her book project, tentatively titled The Terms of the Lease: Renting and the Making of Racial Inequality in the Modern American City.
Degyansky looks forward to having mentors in the Program in Climate and Environmental Studies provide input on her current book project, tentatively titled Toward Otherwise: Occupation, Rupture, and Wildness on a 12-Acre Plot of Land. She is ethnographically documenting an immigrant-led cooperative land project’s attempts at building other ways of being in the world.
Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program’s rising profile
The program continues to increase its visibility in higher education networks, with submitted applications growing from 51 in the first year to more than 300 in 2026. CHPP currently has 10 fellows with 19 alumni having completed the program. On average, there are three to four positions available each year as fellows graduate and begin their careers.
“We have a remarkable group of fellows, and we want to be sure that the campus community knows about them,” Cohen said. “Our hope is that faculty and graduate students will strive to connect with the current CHPP fellows and find points of convergence with their scholarship.”
Applications for the next cohort will open October 15. For more information, contact Kaitlyn Witt.