UW's New Mellon Grant for Storytelling Examined on Next ‘Wyoming Chronicle’

The University of Wyoming's new humanities-based Ph.D. program is the topic of the next installment of "Wyoming Chronicle," an innovative program on Wyoming PBS with newsmakers, artists and unique Wyoming personalities. The show airs at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27, on the main Wyoming PBS channel.

The UW Department of English devised the PhD, and Nancy Small, an associate professor in the UW Department of English, received a grant to support it. The basis of the program is storytelling, a simple-sounding topic that Small says is a useful research field well worthy of a Ph.D.

Small and three graduate students who will help inaugurate the new Ph.D. program are interviewed by "Wyoming Chronicle" Public Affairs Senior Producer Steve Peck.

While stories put forth in popular entertainment, news media and people in positions of power and prominence are important, Small says the new UW program will have a different focus.

"What I'm really interested in is everyday people storytelling," she says. "That kind of informal, everyday storytelling is how we communicate values; it's how we communicate belonging. So, I feel like stories are the things that make our world, and that's why it's important to look at them, not just on the basis of the big-stage stories, but the little everyday stories.

"Storytelling is what we live in, so it is important to think about it at the community level and what that means for our communities. I think that's an important thing for us to acquire. Especially in contemporary times, there's a lot of division, so I think we can learn from one another's stories. We might not be able to repair all of those divisions, but we can begin to understand each other a little bit better."

Small applied for a grant to support the new doctoral program through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which came through with $850,000 to be spent over three years.

"It's quite shocking," Small says, noting that consultation, guidance and support from the university and her department helped move the grant process forward.

Among other things, the grant will facilitate the hiring of new faculty and developing student internships for the program, titled "Re-Storying the West for a Transformative Future: We Are Wyoming."

Faculty members and students will collaborate with communities to organize story gathering, with the goal of establishing a statewide archive of stories of everyday Wyoming citizens.

"We already have graduate students here in English who are really interested in the environmental and energy sector questions. So, I think that's one example of fantastic interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary kinds of partnerships because the scientific end of the spectrum might do the research to come up with a new idea or does solve a problem, and the humanities can say, 'How is the public going to receive this, or how is this going to be received by local governments or national governments?'" Small says. "So, the science is an important piece, but I also told my students that you can be Einstein, but if you're in a box because you can't stick your head out and communicate, you are useless Einsteins."

Simply put, Small says, "Science is a story."

Joining in the "Wyoming Chronicle" installment are UW graduate students Anthony Sandoval, of Saratoga; Makayla Kocher, of Monument, Colo.; and Cheyenne Hume, of Cody.

Each student carried out a specific project within the larger guidelines of the new program, based on interviews, photographs or other objects.

Eager to disprove the stereotype that coursework in the humanities, and particularly for English majors, won't yield productive or satisfying jobs after college, the students predicted they would find meaningful employment based on their UW education. All three were undergraduate English majors before entering the new graduate program.

Following Friday's broadcast, the episode is repeated at 1:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, and again at noon Sunday, Sept. 29. The new installment also can be seen after its premiere anytime on the Wyoming PBS website and the station's YouTube channel.

About Wyoming PBS

Wyoming PBS is a nonprofit public broadcasting organization serving Wyoming. With a commitment to educating, informing and inspiring, Wyoming PBS produces and broadcasts high-quality programming that addresses the unique needs and interests of the Wyoming community.

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