University Resources for Artistic Research

The Division of the Humanities comprises 18 degree programs across 16 departments and committees, with approximately 800 students from around the world enrolled in our PhD, MFA, and MA programs. The Division teaches fifty foreign languages on a regular basis, and the three master's programs offer remarkable opportunities for students to advance their knowledge of a field in an interdisciplinary context through courses taught by some of the world's leading scholars.

Student Creativity Grants provide students and RSOs with funding for generative creative projects that express the UChicago standards of excellence and critical inquiry. This grant supports work across the arts in general, with a slight preference for projects that show collaborative, cross-disciplinary, or community-engaged works.

UChicago Arts Student Summer Fellowships are designed to fund original student projects undertaken during the summer break and/or students' participation in summer arts training programs. Projects might involve (but are not limited to) original reporting, choreography, sculpture, painting, multi-media, music composition, script-writing, acting workshops, and translation. Generally, projects should be intended for production, performance, or publication during the following academic year. Students who receive training grants may be asked to participate in a fall program to highlight what they have learned.

Student Fine Arts Fund assists the implementation of imaginative student-led projects with grants up to $1,500, and particularly seeks to fund projects that would not typically receive support from other organizations. This grant may also be used to augment existing funding to extend an artist's time on campus, in the form of a master class or interactive discussion.

The Initiative provides opportunities for scholars, students, and arts practitioners, in multiple domains, to pursue original investigations and explore new modes of artistic production and scientific inquiry. MFA students in DoVA have the opportunity to apply for funding for their artistic research through both Graduate Collaboration Grants and the Graduate Fellows Program.

The Richard and Mary L Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. Located in the Midway studios building, the Gray Center is used as a classroom, studio, collaborative workspace or exhibition and performance space. MFA students often participate in co-taught classes through the Gray Center's Mellon Collaborative Fellowship Program and attend evening events in their SIDEBAR programming series.

Directed by DoVA professor Theaster Gates, Arts + Public Life, an initiative of UChicago Arts, builds creative connections on Chicago's South Side through artist residencies, arts education, and artist-led projects and events. Art + Public Life also manages the Arts Incubator.

The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is a site for rigorous inquiry and exchange that encourages the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice. Through strong community and scholarly partnerships, the Museum incorporates diverse ideas, identities, and experiences into its exhibitions and collections, academic initiatives, and public programming. The Smart provides employment opportunity to graduate students through work study.

Through faculty research projects, a global fellows initiative, and exhibitions, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society explores novel approaches to complex human questions at the University of Chicago and beyond. In its first five years, the Neubauer Collegium has supported 80 collaborative research projects, with 53 Visiting Fellows from 17 countries, and over 350 short-term visiting collaborators. Since opening the gallery in 2015, the Neubauer Collegium has hosted 13 exhibitions, each entirely distinct in configuration, media, and materials.

The Franke Institute for the Humanities is both an idea and a place. Conceptually, it represents the highest research and teaching ambitions of the University of Chicago, sponsoring creative and innovative work in established academic disciplines in the arts and humanities and encouraging new projects that cross traditional disciplinary and departmental lines. Materially, its physical space--a suite of offices and public rooms in the Regenstein Library--provides facilities where scholars and artists can do their work, and where that work can be tested and disseminated through discussions, debates, symposia, and public conferences.

The Film Studies Center serves as the support facility and research center for the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (CMS) at the University of Chicago. It provides an ideal site for students and faculty to explore film and other media and plays a vital role in fostering serious interdisciplinary film scholarship. The Center supports classroom teaching, curricular film screening, and individual research in its dedicated screening room and media classrooms, and through the development of its video library and archival film collection. In addition to providing curricular support, the FSC hosts an array of public events programming: archival film screenings, conferences and symposia, workshops, and programs with visiting artists and film scholars.

Providing an unquestioned resource to the University of Chicago and wider city community, Doc Films screens movies every night of the academic year, dedicating one night a week to a particular theme, often featuring movies that could not be seen elsewhere. Besides regular screenings, Doc hosts a variety of special events, such as conversations with directors, faculty members, critics or other experts as well as sneak previews and student films produced by Fire Escape Films. Doc is exclusively run by volunteers who manage every aspect from programming film series to projecting films. They also annually elect the Doc Executive Board.

Doc Films is on record with the Museum of Modern Art as the longest continuously running student film society in the nation, looking back on a more than 75 year old history.

The Research in Art and Visual Evidence (RAVE) Workshop provides a forum for University of Chicago graduate students—and the occasional faculty member or outside speaker—to present their works-in-progress that center on art or any type of visual and material culture. While the workshop is hosted by the Department of Art History, RAVE serves as an important venue for multi-disciplinary scholarship that grapples with visual material in our increasingly visual world. RAVE is thus uniquely positioned to provide visually-minded scholars from across the university with the opportunity to receive feedback from art historians, while also ensuring that art historians think broadly and experimentally about their projects.

The Digital Media Workshop is a forum for students and faculty who work on issues of digital media across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago. As digital media spans theoretical scholarship, scientific inquiry, and artistic practice, this workshop is a highly interdisciplinary site for engaging the political, aesthetic, social, cultural, and technical dimensions of digital media across its many formats. The Digital Media Workshop is held in the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center. As such, this workshop operates as a laboratory where scholars can convene to discuss, design, and test a range of computational and digital media platforms, including digital games, electronic music, virtual & augmented reality, biometrics, motion capture, alternate reality games, machine learning, and other human-computer interaction.

The Mass Culture Workshop is a forum that meets weekly at Cobb Hall for recent and ongoing academic research on the historical, theoretical, and practical dimensions of modern mass media, including cinema, television, journalism, popular music, photography, advertising, fashion, public amusements, and computer technology. Because the scope of many forms of mass culture extends beyond the boundaries of any one discipline, the Workshop is committed to interdisciplinary work. 

The mission of the Special Collections Research Center, the principal repository for and steward of the Library's rare books, manuscripts, University Archives, and the Chicago Jazz Archives, is to provide primary sources to stimulate, enrich, and support research, teaching, learning, and administration at the University of Chicago. Special Collections makes these resources available to a broad constituency as part of the University's engagement with the larger community of scholars and independent researchers.