I am hoping we can discuss creative approaches to graduate training within given disciplines as well as across them. In the humanities, there has been a groundswell of interest in reforming graduate education, revising masters and PhD expectations (most notably the dissertation), and integrating with other departments and programs within the university. These discussions link to, and in some ways anticipate, the increasingly conspicuous attention to alternate academic (#altac) careers. In what ways can we imagine, promote, and support new forms of graduate training at our own institutions or even across them? How can we construct programs or degrees that formalize what has been, at least in the digital humanities, the cherished narrative of the tinkering autodidact, learning ad hoc and hybridizing on her own time? This discussion might draw from current experiments in humanities graduate training (e.g. the Praxis Program in the UVa Scholars’ Lab; the Stanford Lit Lab) and further imagine fruitful collaborations with libraries. What are the skills grads need to know now? And what traditional forms of graduate training should endure, as their values become more apparent by contrast? How will these configurations adapt (or not) to online and distance education, to collaborative possibilities across institutions? And how do we develop the infrastructure to support student and institutional innovations?

(Link to session’s notes / Google Doc.)