Supported by the Mellon Humanities Ph.D. Interventions Project, the Emory Writing Program will award two graduate Mellon Public Writing Fellowships for 2020-2021 to advanced graduate students interested in community engagement and public scholarship. MPW fellows will work 15-20 hours per week for between 16 and 18 weeks with a partnering community organization during the fall semester and early spring semester before returning to campus to engage in dissemination (teaching/tutoring/presenting) activities for the remainder of the academic year. Fellows will receive a stipend of $23,250, along with the Graduate School’s health insurance subsidy for the academic year. Travel costs to the organization site will be covered.
The MPW Fellowship responds to recent academic calls to re-envision doctoral work by broadening our understanding of the activities that comprise research, teaching, and service in the context of the trend toward a more civically engaged university. Co-created community partner projects that seek to engage public audiences beyond academe offer graduate students an opportunity to develop expertise in community knowledge outside of the university. MPW fellows will partner with a community organization to develop and execute a writing project(s) that is mutually beneficial to the fellow and partnering organization.
Fellowship projects could include writing proposals for projects and funding; developing education and training materials; researching and reporting on policy or technology issues; collaborating on organizational documents such as annual reports, press releases, profiles, and so on; designing, developing, and contributing content to organizational websites, assisting with data visualization, interpretation, and publication.
Dissemination projects conducted during the spring semester may include contributing to a database of writing scenarios, prompts, rubrics, and datasets to be used in undergraduate courses, including first-year writing; conducting genre workshops for writing center tutors; coaching writing center tutees who are working on public scholarship projects; presenting about their fellowship projects to professional development seminars in relevant graduate programs, including the newly established Seminar in Public Humanities (GRAD 700); teaching one or more class periods in writing program or English courses, such as ENG 380W: Writing in the Humanities, ENG 389: Introduction to the Digital Humanities, and ENG/QTM 302: Technical Writing, or other relevant continuing writing courses; mentoring graduate students who wish to develop and pitch internships to the MPWF selection committee; conducting public writing workshops as part of Writing Across Emory (WAE), or the College’s writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines (WAC/WID) program; conducting proposal writing for nonprofits workshops in conjunction with the Writing Center or the LGS Grant Writing Program.
Partnering organizations for the 2020-2021 academic year are Common Good Atlanta, a nonprofit organization that “provides incarcerated people with broad, democratic access to higher education so they can develop a better understanding of both themselves and the societal forces at work around them” and Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, a non-profit organization that does pro bono legal work for “low-income Atlantans as they demand safe and stable housing, insist on fair pay for an honest day’s work, and break free from domestic violence.”