College of Humanities

Scott Kleinman's WE1S Project Awarded $1.1 Million by Mellon Foundation

October 16, 2017

The WhatEvery1Says Project (WE1S) co-directed by English Professor Scott Kleinman has been awarded $1.1 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Along with co-directors Alan Liu, Professor English at UC Santa Barbara, Jeremy Douglass, Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and Lindsay Thomas, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Kleinman will spend the next three years studying the representation of the Humanities in public discourse. 

The WE1S project is an outgrowth of 4Humanities, an advocacy initiative that responds to what is often called the “Humanities crisis” — the perception in America and some other nations that the disciplines within the Humanities are of little value in higher education and society at large. WE1S will address the issue by mining digital media to learn what pundits, politicians, scholars, students and others think about the Humanities in order to formulate strategies and narratives to counter misconceptions about the liberal arts and Humanities.

During each of the three years of the grant, CSUN will bring together teams of students and faculty for “summer research camps” to use these tools to study public discourse about the Humanities. Led by Mauro Carassai, Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies, the research camps will coordinate with parallel teams working at the other participating campuses to research source material, analyze data, and develop resources for Humanities advocacy based on the project's work.

More information can be found on the project’s website: http://we1s.ucsb.edu/.