Graduate College launches new innovative fellows initiative

The Graduate College has launched the Graduate College Fellows Initiative and named two Arizona State University faculty members to serve as 2019-20 fellows.

The inaugural fellows, professors Sally Kitch and John Wisneski, were selected for their commitment to intellectual leadership in graduate education and their ability to inspire cutting-edge learning opportunities for graduate students. Over the course of the next year, Kitch and Wisneski will create an experiential learning model for interdisciplinary teams of graduate students to solve complex problems of social significance.

“The goal of the Graduate College Fellows Initiative,” said Graduate College Dean Alfredo Artiles, “is to leverage, institutionalize and scale up the ingenuity and innovations of our faculty to enrich graduate curricula across disciplines.

“We are eager to begin this new phase of graduate education innovation at Arizona State University with such committed colleagues. Sally Kitch and John Wisneski will help us build a solid foundation on which to build the new program.”

Kitch is the founding director of both the Institute for Humanities Research and the Humanities Lab, Regents Professor of Women and Gender Studies, Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and an affiliated faculty member with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

Kitch said she is very interested in using the humanities to teach students how to address intense social problems like immigration and climate change.

“All of these challenges are actually challenges that entail human belief systems, power struggles, historical contexts that may or may not be visible and cultural contexts that influence the way people think about problems like that,” Kitch said.

Wisneski is a clinical assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship in the W. P. Carey School of Business. He is also the faculty director of the MBA program and has taught courses in strategic management, management consulting and project management.

“Ultimately, we hope to provide intellectual leadership and inspire cutting-edge learning opportunities,” Wisneski said. “Although a year is a short period of time to achieve such lofty goals, I cannot wait to get started by collaborating with the many academic, community and industry partners who can help make it happen.”

The Graduate College plans to share contributions made by the fellows with the ASU community each year.