For Faculty & Teaching Staff

The Conway Center supports Smith faculty, staff, and students in thinking across disciplines and considering the interconnectedness of people, planet, and profit in order to make sustainable and impactful change.

If you are a faculty member and have questions or ideas for collaborating with the Conway Center, please email your Division Liaison.

Divisional Faculty Liaisons

Innovation Fellowships

Designed to support faculty experimentation across campus, our new Innovation Fellowship program encourages faculty and teaching staff to develop and incubate new ideas or implement already well-defined projects. An interdisciplinary reviewing committee will consider proposals for innovation projects in individual research, the curriculum, or within academic units.

The reviewing committee will prioritize applications that result in cross-divisional representation and participation from under-represented departments in the innovation space. In response to the recent work by the Research Working Group and the experiments within Humanities and Social Science Labs, the reviewing committee also welcomes proposals related to student involvement in faculty research across divisions (or the incubation of such collaborations).

Feel free to contact the Associate Dean for Integrative Learning to discuss your ideas and questions.

The Details

Faculty will be provided with a stipend (up to $2,000 depending on project length), project support funds (for materials, field trips, etc., up to $1,000), and funds to hire one or more student fellows.

The timeframe for projects can be for one semester, a full academic year, or one semester and a summer.

Faculty will be asked to provide a final report of the innovation work undertaken. Students on your team will also be asked to submit a reflection on their work and will be invited to participate in bi-monthly Innovation at Smith Luncheons to network with other fellows.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until yearly funds are exhausted.

Foreign Language’s Human Rights Project
The human rights project was developed in four languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, and Russian. The main goals of the project were to benefit language learners and broaden their perspectives on
human rights issues by using multiple languages and focusing on different regions of the world.

Reproductive Justice Futurisms Think Tank Convening
Held at Smith and Amherst Colleges, the Reproductive Justice Futurisms Think Tank Convening brought together nearly 100 front-line multiracial, intergenerational leaders at the intersection of reproductive justice, technology, and human rights, including MacArthur Fellows Byllye Avery, Dorothy Roberts, and Loretta J. Ross. Edited videos of the plenary sessions are available on YouTube; the work can be followed on Instagram; and an anthology is forthcoming.

Submit an Application