The Discovery Research Hub at CICI provides research leadership experience to graduate students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences while entwining the individual learning experiences of undergraduate students with the larger academic pursuits of the university’s community.
The Discovery Research Hub at the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry fosters collaborations in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The program allows graduate students to expand and refine their research while encouraging undergraduate students to explore and reimagine their futures as critical thinkers and professionals, whether within or outside the academy. Graduate Discovery Fellows assemble small research clusters of Undergraduate Scholars who assist them in some aspect of their dissertation research. The Discovery Fellows design a research agenda for their clusters and work with Undergraduate Scholars throughout the academic year to hone methods, concepts, and skills related to the field(s) of their specific project. The program offers Undergraduate Scholars a chance to experience the pursuit of independent research questions within a select community of like-minded students; they essentially participate in a small-scale graduate level research seminar related to their own research interests. At the end of the academic year, the Fellows and Scholars participate in a research symposium in order to share their cluster’s work.
The Fellows participate in interactive workshops throughout the year facilitated by the Discovery Initiative on topics such as project design, mentorship, inclusive research practices, grant writing, and scholarly communication. They apply this training directly within their research clusters, culminating in symposium presentations.
CICI Discovery Fellows receive a stipend in addition to research funds. Twelve research clusters are funded in the 2025-26 academic year. The Fellows span nine unique departments, including Anthropology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Education, Energy and Resources Group, English, Ethnic Studies, Italian Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Their research encompasses topics as varied as: a close analysis of the socialist film The Eternal Wave and its remakes; the intersections of health, spirituality, and disability in the life writing of Black women cultural producers; and how historical plantation systems in Jamaica have shaped the current social and environmental conditions of the Plantain Garden River watershed. The Fellows recruited 56 undergraduates from 35 unique majors to assist them with their research.
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