Graduate Student Summer Internship Program

Grounded Knowledge

Grounded Knowledge is a graduate student summer internship program rooted in communities of struggle to animate dynamic knowledge production, or the humanities in action, to reimagine academic training. Since 2022, the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub (The Hub) has incubated relationships with local organizations, especially those enmeshed in the cause of social justice. These relationships leave The Hub uniquely positioned to co-create public humanities internships that will benefit the organizations and their communities, while opening opportunities for graduate students in the humanities and arts to engage with historical injustices that pulsate in the present. 

This program, with funding provided by the Mellon Foundation through Humanities Without Walls (HWW), builds upon a culture of transformative community engagement and collaborative humanities research made generative by the ethos of reciprocity and redistribution (R&R) that HWW, a consortium of humanities centers based at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has cultivated in the last ten years. 

Program Details

Selected graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) will make an impact while learning new skills and exploring new career paths. They will spend 10 weeks in the summer (20 hours per week, 200 hours total) contributing to one of four identified community organizations in the Twin Cities area (one student per organization).

This program offers a funded and facilitated opportunity for graduate students to:

• Apply their humanistic skills and training in new ways
• Contribute to an organization addressing a vital community need
• Develop new skills and experiences
• Explore unfamiliar career paths

Community Organizations

This year's internship program intentionally builds on existing partnerships between The Hub and three community organizations: 

• AmplifyMN
• Soomaal House of Art
• The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (The SEAD Project). 

Each selected applicant will complete an internship at one of these organizations. 

Eligibility 

CLA PhD graduate students in arts, humanities, or humanistic social science disciplines in good standing at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities are eligible to apply. Students must be registered in spring 2026 and plan to graduate after August 2026. Preference will be given to applicants in the latter half of their programs.