The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) fosters cross-divisional, cross-regional, and global collaborations in order to address the key political, social, religious, and cultural issues of our time. The center is committed to thinking creatively across an array of fields to develop a capacious vision of the arts, humanities, and social sciences, in relation to critical thought, justice, and ethics.
Launched in Fall 2025, the CICI-housed Discovery Research Hub welcomes research clusters in the arts and humanities. Participation in the Hub allows Graduate Fellows to expand and refine their leadership and mentorship skills while encouraging Undergraduate Scholars to explore and reimagine their futures as critical thinkers and professionals, whether within or outside the academy.
Post-prospectus Graduate Fellows assemble clusters of 2-4 Undergraduate Scholars who assist them in some aspect of their dissertation research. The Graduate Fellows design a research agenda for their clusters and work with Undergraduate Scholars throughout the academic year to hone methods, concepts, and skills related to the field(s) of their specific project. The program offers Undergraduate Scholars a chance to experience the pursuit of independent research questions within a select community of interdisciplinary students. At the end of the academic year, the Fellows and Scholars participate in a research symposium to share their cluster’s work.
Leadership & Mentorship Development
The Discovery Research Hub supports the development of graduate students' dissertations while developing their leadership and mentorship skills. The Graduate Fellows attend monthly workshops to learn skills for creating productive mentoring relationships, applying for professional and academic opportunities, developing coherent pitches and presentations, and other aspects of leadership development that will serve them in future career pathways. These sessions incorporate guest speakers, structured workshop time, peer reflection, and networking, and they conclude in a symposium. Some workshops also include Undergraduate Scholars. This workshop series, facilitated by Berkeley Discovery, fosters community among the participants which in turn has the potential to lead to further collaboration among them, their home departments, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.
Research Clusters and Funding
Research clusters receive funding for a whole academic year to ensure ample time for the development of their ideas and the community of student researchers. Each cluster is composed of 2-4 Undergraduate Scholars who come with, and may even be recruited for, their own interests in some part of the Graduate Fellow’s doctoral research. For example, if the Graduate Fellow is studying the origins of photography and developments in 19th-century fiction, one Undergraduate Scholar might be interested in the history of photography as art, while another might be intrigued by the science that led to the development of photography, and yet another by the relationship between photography and print journalism.
Graduate Fellows manage and lead their research clusters’ activities. The aim of the research cluster is not only to develop each Fellow’s dissertation work through the act of teaching and sharing their research, but also to actively involve undergraduates in the work of the dissertation research process. Therefore, a helpful organizational framework for many groups is to model the research cluster on a writing group or a graduate seminar, with a focus on helping students learn about and practice the discipline and academic work itself.
Possible activities that develop the dissertation research and related skills include collaboratively engaging with a shared reading list on topics of mutual interest, authoring and providing feedback on written work, preparing for and attending conferences or seminars, building parts of a critical methodology, developing a proof of concept for theoretical claims, supporting a literature review or developing close readings, designing and conducting interview-based research, and carrying out archival research.
Regardless of how their research clusters are configured, Graduate Fellows are provided with stipends of $1,000 per Undergraduate Scholar per semester. Graduate Fellows will also be able to apply for a modest pool of research funds (up to $500) to support their project.
Research cluster examples:
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A Graduate Fellow working on a project involving the relationship between minimalist art, autobiography, and gay male identity might find two Undergraduate Scholar student researchers: one with a background in art history and one with a background in gender studies.
This Fellow might then assemble three reading lists: One that covers their project’s most important texts, a second that focuses on the best sources on minimalist art, and a third that covers their field’s specific takes on gay male identity.
The Fellow would then convene their cluster to discuss texts from the central reading list, guiding the Undergraduate Scholars through major concerns or theoretical problems in the central field of interest. Through this process, the Fellow would invite them to expand or even redirect this discussion in light of their own readings of both the central texts and the texts on the secondary lists–lists which the Fellow would teach them to expand. The Undergraduate Scholars would use this research and reading to inform their honors theses, while the Fellow would use it to inform the development of a literature review.
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A Graduate Fellow working on representations of race and surveillance technologies might find two Undergraduate Scholars: one with a background in ethnic studies or critical race theory and one with a background in AI.
After sessions to address the cluster’s research frameworks, the first student would work on an annotated bibliography of key texts for the Fellow’s dissertation introduction, while the second would perform a series of mixed methods studies to see how AI responds to different images that would be a part one of the Fellow’s dissertation chapters. With these different contributions, the cluster would present a panel together at an academic conference.
Examples of previous research are available on the CICI website. Graduate Fellows in the 2025-26 academic year were from nine unique departments, including Anthropology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Education, Energy and Resources Group, English, Ethnic Studies, Italian Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Their research encompassed topics as varied as: a close analysis of the socialist film The Eternal Wave and its remakes; the intersections of health, spirituality, and disability in the life writing of Black women cultural producers; and how historical plantation systems in Jamaica have shaped the current social and environmental conditions of the Plantain Garden River watershed.
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