UCHRI Manuscript Workshop and Research Development Program

The UCHRI Manuscript Workshop and Research Development Program is an intercampus initiative that serves the publication goals of early- and mid-career faculty members in the humanities and qualitative social sciences while helping them build strong networks of support in their fields and across the University of California.

In addition to funding online manuscript workshops, the program also provides quarterly research development sessions and culminates in a writing retreat with an academic press editor. This structure advances the publication goals of individual faculty and builds new communities of concern around particular research topics, including areas that may not be fully supported by traditional departmental structures. As one former participant put it: “The award has been tremendously helpful in advancing my career as junior faculty in the UC system. The workshop itself enabled me to discuss my work at length with the invited scholars, but in doing so I developed new professional contacts.”

2024 Instagram campaign featuring books published as a result of faculty manuscript grants funded by UCHRI.

The program is funded by and supports the goals of the Advancing Faculty Diversity Program run by the Office of the Vice Provost of Academic Personnel and Programs at UCOP. This opportunity is open to all UC faculty at the assistant and associate levels in the humanities and qualitative social sciences; faculty who have contributed substantively to building a culture of inclusive excellence on their campus, have encountered unexpected obstacles in completing their research, and/or are working in emergent or underserved research areas are especially encouraged to apply.

Advisory Board

Andrew Jolivétte Andrew Jolivétte is a Professor of Sociology and American Indian and Indigenous Studies at UC Santa Barbara where he is working with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Collective to develop the first Department of American Indian and Indigenous Studies on campus. Dr. Jolivétte is a former Professor and Department Chair of Ethnic Studies as well as the inaugural founding Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at UC San Diego. He is the author or editor of nine books including the Lammy Award-nominated Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community (University of Washington Press, 2016); Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, 2006); and the forthcoming book, Thrivance Circuitry: Queer Afro-Indigenous Futurity and Kinship. Dr. Jolivétte is an enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Louisiana.

Chelsea Schields Chelsea Schields is an Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine and a transnational historian of sexuality, energy, and empire in the Caribbean and Europe. Her first book, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (UC Press, 2023) won the Bryce Wood Book Award and the Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, the Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award, and the World History Connected Book Prize from the World History Association. Her new project, Electric Archipelago: Power Politics in the Caribbean, tracks the electrification of the region from the 1880s to the climate and debt crises imperiling energy provision in the present.

Matthew Vernon Matthew Vernon is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Davis. His first book, The Black Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), explores the understudied relationship between medievalism and Blackness in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. He has also written articles on a set of his interests around issues of race and genre. This has led to articles on the post-truth phenomenon in nineteenth-century novels, Black speculative fiction, and comic books about displacement and vulnerability. He is currently working on an article on the adaptation of the medieval play, Everyman.

Margo Irvin, Ex Officio Margo Irvin is a Senior Editor at UC Press, and acquires books in premodern history, world history, and religion. She is particularly interested in projects that are comparative or global in nature, and that explore the flow of people, ideas, and things across geographic and linguistic boundaries. She also acquires for World Literature in Translation: a publishing program dedicated to developing a truly inclusive global canon representing diverse literary traditions. Before coming to UC Press, Margo acquired titles in history, religion, philosophy, and linguistics at Stanford University Press and Routledge.