Mellon Public Humanities Labs 2025-2026

Public Humanities Labs (PHLs) are the Axinn Center for the Humanities’ most recent innovation to increase enrollments in the humanities through experiential and interventionist education. Established in 2021 and recognized in 2023 by the National Humanities Alliance as an exemplary model for building collegiate public humanities, Public Humanities Labs provide deep investigations into core humanities topics, such as justice, equity, and narrative storytelling, with familiar disciplinary frameworks like history, literature, and philosophy. Through funding from the Mellon Humanities for All Times grant, Middlebury College will provide thirty new Public Humanities Labs. Their innovative structure allows them to intentionally combine hands-on, practical and applied educational tools, involving extensive student research and skill-set building, with the public dissemination of the results, via such means as presentations, websites, and reports. By linking humanistic classroom-learning with a public-facing component, these PHLs will allow students to research and learn about migrant justice and make informed and meaningful interventions.

In Fall 2026, the following faculty are teaching Mellon Public Humanities Labs: Rachael Joo (American Studies), Benjamin Graves (First Year Seminar), Sarah Rogers (History of Art and Architecture), and Roberto Lint Sagarena (American Studies).

AMST0343: Humanitarian Visas in Vermont and Beyond

This public humanities lab course will engage the topic of humanitarian visas in Vermont and beyond the state. We will learn about the various forms of humanitarian visas as historically defined by the US government including visas for refugees, asylees, trafficked people, and those who qualify for temporary protected status. We will study the histories of refugee resettlement in Vermont and learn from organizations that advocate on behalf of migrants. (Instructor: Professor Rachael Joo)

AMST0213: Intro to Latina/o Studies

In this course we will undertake an interdisciplinary investigation of the unique experiences and conditions of U.S. Latina/os of Caribbean, Latin American, and Mexican descent. We will critically examine transnational cultures, patterns of circular migration, and intergenerational transformations from a historical perspective while also using methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. Topics will include the conquest of Mexico’s northern frontier, Chicana/o and Nuyorican movements, Latina feminist thought, Latina/o arts, Central American migrations in the 1980s, Latina/o religiosities, as well as philosophies of resistance and acculturation. (Instructor: Professor Roberto Lint Sagarena)

FYSE1514: Refugee Stories

“Stories are just things we fabricate,” says a character in Viet Nguyen’s The Refugees. “We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.” In this course students will find stories by and about a paradigmatic modern figure: the displaced refugee seeking asylum in unfamiliar lands. Highlighting literary and visual representations, we will also draw from history, sociology, anthropology, environmental studies, and feminist critique. Beginning with the Syrian refugee crisis, we will circle back to the Vietnam War and the lingering questions it poses to today’s social justice movement. (Instructor: Professor Benjamin Graves)

HARC0362: Art, Migration, and Museums

Can artists and museums respond to the current refugee crisis? The 21stst century has witnessed the undeniable prevalence of the refugee, the migrant, and the politically displaced — categories produced by global capitalism’s uneven distribution of resources. Against this reality, artists and curators engage with representations of the disposed. In this course we will consider how the art world integrates the figure of the refugee into the traditionally reified space of the museum and examine the possibility of art to transcend barriers and generate empathy and solidarity. Possible topics include art programming and refugee integration; museum responses to the migrant crisis; migration and repatriation; boycott and divestment efforts. (Instructor: Professor Sarah Rogers)