The past year has visited forms of isolation and attenuated interaction on all members of the Brown community. While I think everyone has been grateful for what was possible to achieve in the virtual format, the energy and eventfulness of in-person academic life have been sorely missed. Like other intellectual hubs on campus, the Cogut Institute pivoted quickly to an online presence in late spring of 2020, thanks to the efforts of Interim Director Tim Bewes and Associate Director Damien Mahiet (I was on sabbatical when the pandemic hit). But the transition posed a series of ongoing challenges.

When I think back to the summer of 2020, I recall wondering how we might best approach the remote format moving forward, especially given our extensive programming mission. At that early point in the pandemic, the format of choice seemed to be the “zoom conversation,” and I remember thinking we would need to find alternatives to the unrelieved experience of zoom, since it was also the medium through which we would be doing everything: our administrative business, our teaching and advising, and many social and familial interactions as well. Gone was the invigorating shift in venue from the meeting to the seminar to the lecture, not to mention the physical transit between university spaces and the ruminative walk or drive home. Everything was experienced in the same two-dimensional gallery format ending with an abrupt flash. Gone too were the nonce encounters that characterize in-person arrivals and leave-taking: in their place were efforts at initial small-talk, public and private interactions in the chat, and wan hand-waving at the close.

Thanks to the commitment and dedication of our community of event conveners, plans emerged quickly at the Cogut Institute to present dynamic events on critical issues of racial justice, the challenges facing democracy, and the ways in which the environmental humanities can help address a wide range of questions connected to global climate change, including our increasing vulnerability to pandemics. I am especially grateful to Tina Campt’s leadership of the Black Visualities Initiative, Leela Gandhi’s programming of the series “Race in a Global Frame” under the aegis of the Humanities in the World Initiative, and the vibrant, committee-led programming of Environmental Humanities at Brown. These online events expanded our audiences far beyond the local, in some cases bringing in collaborators and participants from around the globe, in an inspiring demonstration of the transformative potential of remote public programming.

As part of our ongoing focus on collaborative models of doctoral education in the humanities, we had prior plans to launch a project on the 21st-Century PhD during 2020-2021, and that particular endeavor took on added salience as the job market crisis for humanities PhDs became even more acute, with many universities instituting hiring freezes and admissions pauses. We engaged five graduate proctors in the summer of 2020 to help research new thinking on questions of doctoral study and to brainstorm programming ideas, which eventuated in events on public writing and the uses of data-visualization for dissertations in the humanities. We have continued to host conversations with colleagues across departments on ways we might rethink graduate education in light of changing economic and cultural contexts for doctorate-based careers and new conceptions of humanities work.

We also found ourselves expanding our formats in ways that I hope will be lasting, even as it becomes possible to transition more of our events back to in-person venues. We experimented with formats that involved shorter talks and more dynamic and dialogical modes. On zoom, it is hard to stay focused on the standard 50-minute public talk. And we launched a podcast, Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities, which allowed us to present cutting-edge work in the humanities in a new way. An audio-only format was especially welcome at a time when video-conferencing and video-events dominated the academic lifeworld. Meeting Street has also pressed us to communicate in ways more mindful of audiences beyond the university. Our first season of shows included episodes on disability studies, knowledge production in the humanities, data science, the environmental humanities, and feminist criticism. Two additional episodes featured pairs of Brown University scholars who collaborated across disciplines to teach innovative research-based undergraduate courses: one on the history and science of virtual reality (with Fulvio Domini and Massimo Riva), and the other on political activism in the context of loss, with special focus on the Movement for Black Lives (with Juliet Hooker and Emily Owens).

Over the course of the past year I have heard testimonies from faculty members across the university about some of the benefits of remote teaching in video formats. At the Cogut Institute we discovered that our own collaborative programs, which involve not only team-teaching but also student collaborative projects, had unexpected benefits during an isolating time, fostering connections and community outside of zoom hours. My own weekly meetings with the wonderful colleagues I had the privilege to co-teach with in 2020-2021 involved sustaining conversations about ideas, pedagogy, and life during the pandemic. Two other Cogut Institute contexts were especially rewarding and illuminating under pandemic conditions: the weekly fellows seminar and the spring 2021 Project Development Workshop of the doctoral certificate in collaborative humanities.

What was striking in both instances was the sustaining nature of spaces devoted to sharing work-in-progress under general conditions of stress and isolation. During a year when many people found it very difficult to concentrate on their own research for any sustained period of time, these spaces were surprisingly effective at creating supportive environments in which work was advanced and powerful connections were forged. Beyond the catalyzing effect that collaboration has on research and thinking, then, it is also a key form of community building. We knew this already, but perhaps what was less evident was the realization that collaboration can be crucial to enduring crisis and modeling forms of response to it. And given the multiple crises we continue to face—racial injustice, health inequities, and global climate change, among others—our ability to foster and sustain communities in and beyond the university will be critical moving forward. At the Cogut Institute, we look forward to working with our many partners in and beyond Brown in the crucial months and years ahead.