Documenting the University of Michigan’s Full History
The IHP is engaged in rigorous, scholarly research to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the university’s history.
Our work is organized by four Frames, which are essential themes that provide a structure for the project’s wide-ranging research. Within each Frame are bounded, specific Project Sites, which focus the project’s research further.
Origins & Trajectories houses projects that focus on the trajectory of the university over time, with a focus on examining received histories, recontextualizing existing narratives, and centering heretofore ignored stories.
People & Communities includes projects that focus on the lived experiences of individuals and communities within and around our campuses and on how institutional policies, practices, and norms have affected these experiences.
Sites & Symbols organizes projects that explore the significance to institutional life of symbolic and material sites of memorialization and commemoration. Whether they take the form of named spaces, legendary figures, public art, iconic structures, or shared rituals, these tokens of collective identity serve not only to express but also to shape and sustain systems of value that can help to forge community even as they demarcate zones of exclusion from it.
Research & Teaching foregrounds the centrality of knowledge production to the university’s mission across time and place. It encourages reflection on how research and teaching have been defined, articulated, and practiced, how they have been resourced and evaluated, and what the implications of these contingent understandings of the university’s core activities have been for the education of our students and our contributions to society at large.
Project sites for the Research & Teaching Frame are currently in development.
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![University of Michigan. ”Campus areas of the University of Michigan [map].” Scale not given. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 1956.](https://inclusivehistory.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/map-of-the-university-of-michigan-blue-scaled.jpg)
![University of Michigan. ”Campus areas of the University of Michigan [map].” Scale not given. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 1956.](https://inclusivehistory.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/map-of-the-university-of-michigan-blue-pop-up.jpg)
