People
Program Administration
Letter from the Director
If one could choose any time at all to begin directing a humanities center at a large public university, it might not be during a year of global economic crisis. It might not be during a year in which the threat of the financial collapse of the university became a looming specter. It also might not be during a year in which The New York Times repeatedly featured editorials by a select number of eminent humanists announcing—and based on various claims—the death or imminent death of the humanities. But then again, it might be. Crisis, after all, has its virtues and it begets specific types of opportunities. It forces assessment and the articulation or rearticulation of goals and values. Trite though it may seem, and despite a personal penchant for comfort over distress, the constraints imposed by extremely lean budgets and the possibility of eradication can serve as a catalyst for tremendous creativity. I am happy to report that despite a year characterized in many sectors by retrenchment, IPRH has grown in some important and substantial ways.
Our core activities from the past remain in place, such as our faculty and graduate student fellowship program, and I am delighted to announce the addition of a new faculty fellowship. Through the generosity of Dean Robert Graves, we have secured funding for a designated IPRH/FAA Faculty Fellowship. You can read about this years’ recipient, Professor Oscar Vázquez from the Program in Art History, in our profiles of faculty fellows in the pages that follow. With this addition, and the continuation of support generously provided by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Nicholson Endowment, we are now able to offer seven faculty fellowships and eight graduate fellowships annually. Due to budget constraints, we have temporarily suspended funding for our reading groups, but we continue to provide administrative support, to advertise the reading groups on our web site, and to provide a venue for reading group meetings in the IPRH building. It is my hope that we will be able to reinstate funding for the reading groups as soon as possible since we consider them an essential component of our mission. The reading groups contribute in important ways to the incredible vitality that characterizes the humanities and arts at the University of Illinois and we will look for new ways to sustain and nurture them in the coming year. We’ve also begun to make their activities more widely accessible by providing links to reading group blogs on the IPRH web site. We hope you’ll take a few moments to check out the blogs and see what your colleagues are discussing.
With funding generously provided by the Environmental Change Institute and by the Center for Sustainability, we have organized a lecture series on “Climate Change and the Humanities” for the coming academic year. Scientific research on climate change tends to emphasize data analysis, and scientists’ conclusions are limited to what can be learned from that data. As Richard Franke has recently pointed out, humanists can play an important role in climate change research by helping us understand and prepare for the social, ethical, and other human consequences of climate change, asking questions now that can help us understand what may be coming—both locally and globally. To that end, we’ve invited a group of renowned scholars to lecture on campus including environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, environmental ethicist Andrew Light, geographer Jake Kosek, anthropologist Julia Cruikshank, and writer Rob Nixon. Their engagement with this, arguably one of the most pressing issues of our time, demonstrates the important role the humanities can play in helping us understand everyday decisions, human action, and their implications on public policy, human health, and the future. As Franke also stated, “A citizenry exposed to the humanities is able to identify and articulate the issues most important to their lives and, in turn, make decisions with greater clarity…by questioning how a problem is framed and critically analyzing its evidence, the humanities serve as a safeguard to the public sphere.”i Although we need not always do so, humanities scholarship can—and sometimes must—ask questions that can be brought to bear on the socially and politically urgent issues of our time. This is precisely our aim in bringing the “Climate Change and the Humanities” series to campus. I extend my sincere thanks to Wes Jarrell and to Dick Warner for their support of this series.
Given the times in which we live, and emerging and continuing discussions about the role of the humanities in the 21st century, it seems increasingly wise to embrace the “Do Both” approach recommended by Robert Weisbuch in his ACLS report of 2006.ii We must preserve the great traditions of scholarship in the humanities that allow us to ask and answer questions that lead us to knowledge for its own sake and that leads us along pathways not yet defined. We must treasure and nurture the scholar who requires little more than time to read and to think, a laptop, and a rare book or set of documents in order to produce fresh scholarship on matters that may not appear to have immediate relevance to 21st-century life. Simultaneously, we must also find ways to facilitate and foster the work of a growing number of humanists who require advanced technologies to manage and analyze large data sets that may have complex ramifications in space and time, or whose work relies on sophisticated visualization technologies to facilitate new interpretations and to elucidate new meanings. These digital humanists may ask questions similar to those working with more conventional materials and tools but they are often managing information at a much larger scale, or they may be asking new kinds of questions facilitated by the technologies now at their disposal. At Illinois, we are uniquely positioned to become leaders in the digital arts and humanities—as we arguably already have become—because we have at our disposal the powerful infrastructural support and leading scholars in digital arts and humanities that are required to produce cutting-edge digital projects. Both the scholar working with traditional tools and the scholar working with digital tools have much to tell us about how we dwell and have dwelled in the world; both elucidate essential aspects of what it means to be human. And both will find support at the IPRH, where our core mission of supporting all endeavors related to the humanities persists. We will, to use Weisbuch’s term, “do both,” since embracing the new need not come at the expense of the old and familiar.
To that end, we are this year hosting our first-ever digital humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, Kirsten Uszkalo from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. A specialist in seventeenth-century literature, early modern culture, and women’s writing, Kirsten’s research (among other things) uses digital tools to elucidate new aspects of the history of witches and witch trials in early modern England. Made possible through the generous support of Dean John Unsworth and ICubed, Kirsten will be jointly hosted by the IPRH and the Department of History where she will also teach one course during the academic year. Also in collaboration with ICubed, we will host a lecture by Dr. Johanna Drucker, a leading scholar of visual studies, digital aesthetics, and the history of visual information design. As a recent digital humanities fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center, and as a faculty member at UCLA, Drucker has been working on a project titled “Diagramming Interpretation” which she is also applying to research on the design of environments for digital scholarship.
These things are new, but we will this year also continue our tradition of using an annual theme to structure our fellowship program. To kick off our “Representation” year, we will welcome Irit Rogoff to campus this fall. A Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, Dr. Rogoff will deliver a keynote address and spend a day in workshop with our Fellows. As a scholar who writes about the intersections of contemporary art, critical theory, colonialism, cultural difference, and performativity, Rogoff’s research delves into a wide range of concerns that are at the heart of humanistic inquiry. After this year, we will suspend the use of an annual theme, not as the conclusion of what was ever a bad idea, but as a suspension of what was a productive idea that may have come to its natural conclusion. The annual themes were useful because they implied that the Fellows shared common intellectual ground. The themes facilitated discussion based on a shared body of assumptions, of the “already known,” but they could also lead to an avoidance of discussions centered on difficult topics or of subject areas not shared in common. Instead, we want to embrace those difficult topics, and to make sure that the IPRH fellowships are accessible to the broadest range of scholars in the humanities on our campus. Our selection of Fellows for the 2010-11 year will, as always, be based on scholarly excellence.
It is with great pleasure that the IPRH continues to support the Odyssey Project, and the Education Justice Project for which we provide space and some infrastructural support. In the coming years, we hope to find ways to increase our commitment to the public humanities and to extend our reach more broadly across campus and into the community. To that end, we will henceforth be posting podcasts and video captures of our events on the newly redesigned IPRH web site. We hope you’ll look for these and find ways to use them in your teaching and research.
In the coming years, IPRH will continue to create the conditions necessary for important dialogue, and to serve as a venue for the discussion of difficult questions and issues that are central to our understanding of the human condition. We will continue to be a platform for discussions about the humanities on this campus and beyond, and we will reiterate and find imaginative new ways to articulate the significance of our endeavors to the widest possible audience. I hope you’ll join us as we embark on another exciting year—keep an eye on our calendar and keep looking for our electronic event announcements—and I welcome you to stop by our offices for a chat.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Harris
i. Richard J. Franke, “The Power of the Humanities and a Challenge to Humanists,” Daedalus, Winter, 2009, pp. 20-21.
ii. Robert Weisbuch, “The Silence—and the Noise—of the Humanities,” in The Humanities and its Publics, ACLS Occasional Paper, no. 61, ACLS, 2006, p. 20.