Humanities Building

In his capacity as vice provost, Byrd provides high-level strategic leadership for diversity initiatives and coordinates offices across the campus to help create one point of responsibility for all programs and efforts around diversity. This includes overseeing the design and development of our new MultiCultural Center (MCC). The revamped MCC is a priority that will benefit from Byrd’s deep familiarity with Rice’s campus culture as an undergraduate, as a four-year resident associate at Baker College and as five-year magister of Wiess College. Byrd also most recently served as associate dean for the School of Humanities’ undergraduate population, which kept him in touch with students and their concerns.

Since its establishment in 1987, the Humanities Research Center has been committed to fostering connections among diverse disciplines while promoting the research goals of the humanities broadly construed. From its modest beginnings to its present status as an internationally recognized center, the HRC identifies, encourages, and funds innovative research projects by faculty, visiting scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students in the School of Humanities and beyond. This involves supporting scholarly work, facilitating research between the School of Humanities and other areas of Rice University, as well as leading institutional change by partnering with other foundations, centers, research institutions, and universities. Independent initiatives are also taken by the HRC in order to incubate ideas and detect disciplinary changes that shape the future of the university. The HRC has recently launched initiatives in Spatial Humanities, with focus areas in mapping and modeling historic sites and events, and in Public Humanities. Other ongoing programs consist of visiting scholars, seminars, courses, conferences, workshops, lecture series, practicums, exhibitions, performances, and film series. Visit the Humanities Research Center website to learn more about the groundbreaking research our students are working on.

The scholarly inquiry, mentored research, outward-facing programming, global perspective, and commitment to justice long associated with African and African American studies both draws on and enriches (often through deeply engaged criticism) the best of the liberal arts tradition.

The Center for African and African American Studies is Rice's primary location for curriculum and research related to Africa and to people of African descent in the Americas and beyond. The center is a clearinghouse for critical conversation, instruction, cutting-edge research and community outreach in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Visit their website to learn more about the center's mission, its undergraduate minor and graduate certificate, and outreach.