This panel session highlights graduate student support needs and showcases program models emerging from the field of graduate communication studies and writing support. The panel presenters all lead university-based initiatives and develop programming to support graduate students across disciplines when they write high-stakes projects like theses and dissertations. As members of the professional organization Consortium on Graduate Communication, we look to best practices and models, such as those described in Supporting Graduate Student Writers (2016) and Writing Together (2025), which are designed to promote important outcomes related to professional development, successful navigation of graduate school requirements, community, and well-being, in addition to becoming proficient writers and communicators in their fields. In our presentations, we each share program profiles and data that demonstrate how we meet graduate student writing and communication support needs across a range of institutional contexts. Such programs may partner with academic departments but are often located in administrative or non-academic units, affording an extra-disciplinary perspective on the ways graduate students both within the humanities and across disciplines benefit from writing-as-professional development, writing in social spaces, and cross-campus peer writing collaborations and opportunities.
Graduate Communication Partners in the Humanities Ecosystem (10 minutes)
The opening presentation situates the session within the ACLS–NEH–MLA Doctoral Futures collaboration and MLA’s “Graduate Programs” strand, extending ACLS’s call for departmental convenings to include graduate communication partners as co-designers for cross‑institutional communities of practice and robust support structures. It synthesizes recent MLA/ACLS guidance and evidence‑based graduate writing models to contextualize panel presenters’ case‑study data on writers’ goals, needs, engagement, and outcomes in targeted support programs. Referencing her experience leading the Graduate Writing Initiative at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a regional midwestern university working to reinvent itself as a newly designated R1, the first presenter connects the broader context of graduate communication support to three scales of partnered programming: department-embedded, professional development workshops, and a graduate certificate redesign. These early-stage collaborations are creating the spaces and support for a thriving humanities ecosystem while elevating graduate education institution-wide.
What Writers Gain: Insights from a Cross-Disciplinary Dissertation Writing Camp (12 minutes)
The following presentation examines the ASU Graduate Writing Center’s Dissertation Writing Camp, which offers both online and in-person support for prospectus and dissertation writers across disciplines. Drawing on students’ self-reported goals and pre- and post-program evaluations, this presentation explores what participants seek from and gain through cross-disciplinary writing support, as well as how such spaces surface needs and forms of learning that extend beyond departmental training. Rather than treating writing as a purely disciplinary activity, this presentation investigates what becomes visible when graduate writers work alongside peers and peer tutors across disciplines in a structured, non-evaluative environment.
Humanities Dissertation Camps: Cultivating Academic and Professional Success (12 minutes)
In the third presentation, the Director of the UCLA Graduate Writing Center analyzes concerns related to writing challenges and professional development that PhD students report when registering for the two main humanities dissertation summer programs–one focused on writing the dissertation prospectus and one focused on writing a dissertation body chapter. In addition to analyzing concerns reported by participants and program evaluation data, this presentation will address program design for cross-disciplinary programs focused primarily on humanities PhD students, including best practices for cultivating genre knowledge, professional skill development, writing confidence, and community.
Hmmm, Don’t Humanities Graduate Students Already Know How to Write? (12 minutes)
In this final presentation, the founding Director of CSU Writes describes writing support for researchers across the career span and across campus at Colorado State University. Since 2015, CSU Writes has provided programming for graduate students and faculty writers from all colleges. Participation gaps, especially among graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts, have been persistent. A 2026 campus-wide writing needs assessment of CSU’s research and scholarly writers examines how disciplinary contexts shape research practices and engagement in the era of AI. The findings shed light on graduate student-specific writing challenges, highlighting responses from those in the liberal arts. This presentation invites MLA conversation about the unique support needs of graduate students in the humanities and the opportunities for writing program development.
Together these presentations illustrate a practitioner-centered literature on models of graduate communication support by presenting different program examples from multiple institutional contexts. We hope attendees of this session will find ideas, both large and small, that they can use to develop or improve graduate writing support opportunities that empower humanities students at their own institutions.