NCSSM Durham
Research in the Humanities
Opportunities for the Class of 2027 will be announced in September/October 2025
The prerequisite for RHUM is Research Experience in the Humanities, offered in the spring semester, or Summer Research in the Humanities, offered in June. — Interested students enroll in REX Humanities through the registration process and apply to Summer RHUM through SRIP.
About Research in the Humanities ("RHum")
The humanities address questions that scientific inquiry raises but cannot answer on its own terms: to questions of life, we add questions asked of us by the living and the dead. For instance, what is the nature of human nature? In or of what consists the humanity of the human animal (and, for that matter, the animality of the animal)? Here is one possible beginning to our study: Humans are the sort of animals who are able to transform themselves through labor and language—but to transform ourselves into what? What are the conditions which constrain and allow such transformations? How, for example, do we understand our embodiment: not only the physical fact of our bodies, but the ways in which they are given to us, made meaningful as ours and not as ours—as other to us, intimate and yet strange? To speak of embodiment or incarnation is also to speak of the historical conditions within and against which humans struggle to create and recreate themselves. Culture is one site of such struggle. It is where the broken promise of human happiness is renewed, where questions of human fulfilment are incessantly raised. For if happiness is the fulfilment of our nature, then what is that nature, and how is it to be fulfilled? What must be done for us to be truly happy, truly free? What must change? To answer such questions requires that the work of both the laboratory and the library must become the work of freedom—that the study of our nature must become the study of our emancipation.
Research in the Humanities is meant to introduce students to the study of culture as an opportunity for and an occasion of the renewed struggle for a life worthy of humans. It seeks to give its students stronger and deeper historical understanding of both the creative resistance of cultural forms—literature, visual arts, music—to inhumanity and the critical resources these forms offer for the imagination of a different humanity.
Current Students to Contact
What would I do in the program?
Through the study of selected texts from literary, legal and critical theory, and through practice in the art and craft of research, students in the Research Experience in the Humanities learn to produce new knowledge based upon research and writing skills acquired and enhanced in and out of class; to understand the necessity and value of interdisciplinary study that is at once creative, critical, and historical; to generate a research question from their interests; to answer that question (as the thesis); to develop the implications of that answer in a sustained argument of twenty to twenty-five pages, using good and diverse evidence to support strong claims; to discover a form most appropriate to the argument; and, finally, to craft compelling introductions and conclusions to research arguments.
Research in Humanities is organized around theories and practices of research in the humanities and the sciences. The study of theory is necessary because these researches should be critical and historical, interrogating both their subject’s conditions of possibility and the contemporary situation of their study. Why, for instance, is such knowledge necessary, even urgent, and what is its relation to the pressures of one’s own interests and desires? This is not to suggest that research is either motivated or determined by merely subjective concerns; it is, rather, to insist that these concerns are objective, that what one most needs to know is at once intensely personal and profoundly social—that the object of one’s study significantly produces and informs the subjective response, that the world calls to one from within and without. Each week, members of the seminar will consider a particular theoretical approach to reading and writing about diverse texts. These approaches include, but are not limited to, political criticism, cultural and ethnic studies, feminism, gender and sexuality, historicism, and colonial and post-colonial critique. None is required for one’s actual work, but all are useful and good to know—in the struggle for knowledge, which is also to say, for the life that escapes our ways of knowing, one wants to have as many tools (or weapons, if one prefers) as possible. As for the practice, students in the course will gain further experience in the research process, learning how to construct even more artfully an effective thesis statement that will govern an argument developed and sustained throughout a paper of twenty- to twenty-five pages. Attention will be given equally to the form of the research paper and to its content, from the larger questions of the argument’s structure to the more local matters of the sentences and paragraphs in which that argument is specifically conducted. The proper use of evidence, as well as considerations of its evidentiary nature, will also be fundamental to the course’s concerns. Most important, however, is that each member of the seminar learns to cultivate his or her intellectual autonomy with the rigor necessary to real critical and creative achievement. The work of the course culminates in publication in Fifth World, a journal of interdisciplinary research.
How do I know this program is a good fit for me?
Enroll in the Research Experience in Humanities! Talk to others who have taken the course! Take seriously your desires to learn that which is necessary to live the life you most wish to live, then learn how to cultivate them through serious and sustained interdisciplinary study.
What projects have past / current students worked on?
If you are interested in previous work by students in Research in Humanities, you are encouraged to peruse the volumes of Fifth World on the table outside Dr. Cantrell's office (Watts 111).
Some titles of recent work include:
Racial Segregation through the Lens of Chinese Restaurants and Food Culture
One Valley, Two Worlds: The Isolation of Radical Communities in the Toe River Watershed
My Sweater is Gay: The Queering of Fiber Work
Child's Play: Generational Trauma and Its Effect on Childhood Innocence and Racial Awareness
Afro-Indigenous Cultural Connections: How Legal, Socio-Cultural, and Political Means shaped the Identity of Afro-Indigenous Peoples in America.
Requirements
Enroll in Pre-Requisite Course (EN4600)
or
Participate in Summer RHUM (SRIP)
Scheduling
Junior Spring
or
Summer
& Senior Fall
& Senior Fall
Commitment
Two Semesters
or
Summer & One Semester
Course Information
EN4600 & EN4610,
Academic Year
Academic Year
David Cantrell, NCSSM Durham Instructor of Humanities
An eighth-generation Carolinian, David Cantrell grew up in Cherokee, attending Qualla Elementary School, then, after his family moved to what was once the countryside between Winston-Salem and High Point, spending the last years of his youth at Ledford High School. He has enjoyed several different lives, though most of his professional career has been spent teaching at several universities, including Stanford, where he received his doctorate in American literature; the University of Nevada, where he was an NEH postdoctoral fellow; and the University of San Diego, where he had appointments in the college and in the School of Law. The opportunity to teach the extraordinarily gifted students at NCSSM proved, however, even more compelling than a very pleasant life in southern California; thus, some 30 years after leaving his home state, David returned, grateful and glad to join the work of the humanities at NCSSM. David holds a bachelor's degree in English and History from Wake Forest University, a master's degree in divinity with a concentration in Religion and Anthropology from Harvard, and an MA and PhD in American literature from Stanford University.
David joined NCSSM in August 2013. He teaches American Studies, Westerns and the West, the Research Experience in Humanities, and Research in Humanities. For the last eight years, he has led students to Arizona on Mini-Term and J-Term excursions. In 2019-20, David received the award for Outstanding Teacher at NCSSM. Happy to live in Durham, he nonetheless dreams at night of western skies.
Tatiana McInnis, NCSSM Durham Instructor of Humanities
Tatiana McInnis joined NCSSM in August 2021 as an instructor of American Studies and Humanities. She is the author of "To Tell a Black Story of Miami." Originally from South Florida, she has lived and taught in Nashville, Tennessee, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is thrilled to be in the Raleigh-Durham area. She earned her doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University in 2017, teaching there as an instructor in English and Cultural Studies classes where she designed and led courses including “Rethinking the U.S. South,” “Caribbean Diasporas in the U.S.,” and “Behind Bars: The U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex.” She conducted research on representations and mechanisms of anti-Blackness in contemporary American literature, U.S.-Caribbean immigration politics, and, as she puts it, “how race takes place,” or the spatial manifestations of racial hierarchies in the 20th and 21st centuries. After finishing doctoral work, she joined Vanderbilt University’s American Studies program as a lecturer before serving as the Associate Director at the Davis Intercultural Center at Williams College, where she collaborated with students, faculty, and staff to integrate equitable practices across campus, consulted on curricula, and taught. Most recently, she served as a Visiting Professor in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at Texas Christian University. She also holds a master’s degree in English, also from Vanderbilt, and a bachelor’s in English from Florida International University. When she’s not with her students, you'll find her snuggling her dog, Hurston (as in Zora Neale), “hiking” extremely moderate trails, reading, or tending to her mini garden.
Course Descriptions
EN4600 Research Experience in the Humanities
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051 American Studies I
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the rigorous pleasures of research in the humanities. Through work in and out of class, including visits by guest lecturers and trips to local archives and museums, students learn the basic skills of research, including the identification of a compelling intellectual interest and the transformation of that interest into a question that at once requires and excites research of the highest quality. Students then answer this question, in a provisional way, by work that leads first to the statement of a thesis (the answer to the question), then to the initial development of that statement in a shorter paper of ten to twelve pages. Successful completion of the course may also lead to summer research, internships, or apprenticeships with local scholars. Following this course, optional enrollment in EN4610 Research in the Humanities offers selected students the opportunity for more substantial work in their chosen fields of scholarship.
EN4610 Research in the Humanities
Prerequisite(s): Completion of EN4600, AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II or Summer Research in the Humanities with the Dean's approval.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods
Research in Humanities encourages writing and reading that is at once critical and necessarily creative, for by these acts of interdisciplinary scholarship, students seek to construct new objects of knowledge—a knowledge commensurate with their experience of the world, informed and indeed altered by the works and words of others. This course is necessarily interdisciplinary, because it is, among other things, a critique of the division of labor within institutions of knowledge. In other words, even as it seeks to understand how disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and literature constitute their objects of study (the human, the mind, society, etc.), it also attends carefully to the limits of disciplinary formation, to the ways in which the “human” or “nature” escape the classificatory systems within which they are defined and to which they are confined. Research in Humanities is organized around theories and practices of research in the humanities and the sciences. The study of theory is necessary because these researches should be critical and historical, interrogating both their subject’s conditions of possibility and the contemporary situation of their study. Each week, members of the seminar will consider different theoretical approaches to reading and writing about diverse texts. These approaches include, but are not limited to, political criticism, cultural and ethnic studies, feminism, gender and sexuality, historicism, and colonial and post-colonial critique. As for practice, students will learn how to conduct research and how to construct an effective thesis statement that will govern an argument developed and sustained throughout a paper of twenty- to twenty-five pages. The proper use of evidence, as well as considerations of evidentiary significance, will also be fundamental to the course’s concerns. Students will then transform their research into articles for scholarly publication, including Fifth World, NCSSM’s journal of interdisciplinary research in the humanities. They will serve on the editorial board for Fifth World, evaluating submissions, offering suggestions for revisions, and ensuring the timely delivery of the completed journal to the publisher.