The Digital Liberal Arts (DLA) was a faculty-driven, student-focused, staff-inclusive effort to foster innovative digital scholarship and harness digital technologies to push scholarship and learning forward at the institution. Based in the Center for Teaching, Learning & Research (CTLR), the initiative funded and consulted on projects by faculty, staff, and students; generated new ways to bring students into digital scholarship in the liberal arts; assisted with teaching and curricular development; coordinated faculty and student connections to technologists at Middlebury; and helped to link digital research and teaching to civically engaged public work.

DLA explorations took participants deeper into their existing disciplinary research, teaching, and learning; at other times, they led to new modes of collaboration or transformation across departments and units of Middlebury as well as outward toward partnerships with other institutions or through public-facing projects. The DLA also supported Middlebury’s strategic goal to foster more robust critical digital fluency, helping faculty and students better orient themselves in today’s wireless world through liberal arts approaches to the social and political implications of digital technologies.

The DLA initiative was supported from 2014 to 2020, at which point it joined with MiddData to support data and digital  scholarship across the institution. Initial funding for the DLA was generously provided by the Trustees of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Read more about the awarded grant.