Conference Review
Disciplinary Innovation and the Humanities Centre
2-4 April 2009
Summary Abstract
The annual meeting of the European consortium of Institutes of Advanced Studies, NetIAS, hosted this year at CRASSH to coincide with the 800th Anniversary, also coincided with the annual meeting of the Mellon-funded Consortium of Centres of Disciplinary Innovation (CDI): the ‘Four Cs’--University of California at Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, and Columbia. Also attending were directors from the newly-formed UK Consortium of Centres of Advanced Studies (CIAS); the President and members of the Advisory Board of the US-based international Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutions (CHCI); and representatives of the Mellon Foundation. The conference included a lecture, a day of disciplinary papers, and a final morning focused specifically on Humanities Centres.
Amidst this Babel of interlocking acronyms, consortia, and institute and centre directors, the participants found plenty of scope for intellectual exchange, discussion, and networking--as well as guided tours of the collections of the Trinity College Library and the Fitzwillim, and sampling the hospitality of two colleges, one new (Clare Hall, a generous co-host as a member of NetIAS) and one old (Trinity Hall). The conference also drew in current and former CRASSH fellows, including its Early Career, Mellon Teaching Fellows, along with Mellon Post-doctoral Fellows. The international conversation combined its focus on disciplinary innovation with a snapshot of CRASSH in action.
Conference Review
Opened by Kate Pretty (PVC for International Strategy), the conference began with a well-attended lecture in Mill Lane Lecture Rooms by Richard Sennett, previously Director of the NYU Humanities Centre and now Professor of Sociology at LSE. Professor Sennett’s topic, Sociology as Literature, considered the practice of cultural analysis as a form of literature in which the act of writing might be a workshop for thinking, and questions involving authorial voice, narrative, arousal, and generalization came to the fore. The lecture vividly conveyed the craft (and pitfalls) of sociological method and the distinctive practice of writing and social engagement that constitutes Sennett’s contribution to disciplinary innovation.
The second full day was given over to four challenging disciplinary encounters, in which the directors of the humanities centres at the ‘four Cs’ faced off with Cambridge partners of their choice, while Cambridge respondents triangulated the issues raised by each pair. The first panel, Area Studies, Anthropology, and Affirmation, combined Nicholas Dirks (Columbia) on the history of area studies’ origins in WWII and the goals of international strategy with Henrietta Moore (Anthropology) on the emergence of new theories of hope and affirmation in anthropological and social theory, including ‘radical relationality’. What disciplinary and theoretical paradigms, each asked, are ‘fit for purpose’ now?
The panel on Aesthetic Critique and Embodied Affect matched a comparativist, Anthony Cascardi (Berkeley) with Peter de Bolla (English). How should one look at art objects and how do they ‘answer back’? Cascardi’s focus on aesthetic critique in Goya questioned the association of modernity with erasure of the subject, while de Bolla’s focus on blushing as a scopic regime probed the imprint of the body as an approach to Bonnard’s nudes. How might aesthetic critique that included the social and historical converge with the pleasures and practices of non-singular looking? Can we both ‘know’ and ‘look’, and what forms of visual knowledge and pleasure are involved?
Democracy, Rationality, and Religion combined a philosopher, Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia) with an Asian specialist, Susan Bayly (Anthropology). Ghandian ideals of democratic culture and contemporary religiosity in the US Heartland contrasted with the coexistence of religion and the secular in modern Vietnam. Bilgrami identified an epistemic deficit on one hand (which it is the task of politics to remove), while Bayly explored anthropology’s route to understanding how religion might coexist with the secularism of ‘late socialism’ in Vietnam. If an enchanted world had ‘dangers’ that Enlightenment rationality might prevent, did a disenchanted one merely have ‘risks’? How might religion play out from these contrasting perspectives?
The final panel, New Media, Criticism, and Technology, focused on the ways in which cinema had transformed critical parameters. Taking I.A. Richards as his starting point, James Chandler (Chicago) underlined Richards’ exclusion of film from the primarily text-based study of English literature; film was the problem for which ‘criticism’ was to be the cure. How might criticism be extended to new media? David Trotter (English) considered the ways in which literary experiment and technological innovation were intertwined during the Richards era in the first half of the 20th century, focusing on the telephone and the humble comb. New media turned out to be drenched in fantastical projections, while ideas about technological ‘mediation’ offered fresh avenues.
The final morning of the conference convened two panels, on the relation of the Humanities Centre or Institute to their institutions, and on their relation to public issues. John Bell (Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge) described the horizon-scanning activities along with the proactive and convening role of CRASSH. Reginia Gagnier (Director of the new Interdisciplinary Institute at Exeter) described the Institute’s role in building research capacity and interdisciplinary collaborations and providing a base for funded programmes. Nicholas Dirks (VP for Arts and Sciences, Columbia) described the push towards interdisciplinarity and disciplinary transformation that underpinned Columbia’s Mellon-founded Centre and its attempt to link research to teaching. These three models suggested how each related to the needs of the institution.
Discussion foregrounded, among other issues, the role of the Centre or Institute in promoting cultural learning from other styles or questions, and its value as a site where new configurations of knowledge might be developed. A salient difference emerged between the Humanities Centre located within a university and constrained by its needs and the free-standing Institute of Advanced Studies, privately or government -funded, formed around disciplines which were often left unchanged (the European model, or that of the Princeton IAS). How did each contribute to the advancement of knowledge and pursue its remit, be it disciplinary innovation or research? How could the freedom of one and the constraints of the other be thought about constructively?
The final panel addressed Humanities Centres and their publics. James Chandler (Director of Chicago’s Franke Centre) addressed the Centre’s role in facilitating communication with wider publics via the ‘public humanities’ and fora on public questions that reach beyond the university and provide a measure of its impact. Kryzysztof Michalski (Rector, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna) noted that funding makes it impossible to keep the outer world ‘outside’, whether the problem was attracting scholars, exchanges on publicly important problems, or convincing funders to support the Institute. Wim Blockmans (Rector, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies) pointed to the location of the Netherlands IAS as a free-standing institution, 10 km from a political capital and major university, whose range of activities included different kinds of fellow (writers, journalists, artists, translators), bringing the ‘outside’ inside.
Discussion focused on the relation between distance and engagement, including the privileged position of the IAS as a safe haven and the role of the Humanities Centre as a means of public communication within and beyond the university. The challenge to both was to translate their usefulness effectively. Does IAS or Centre have a lasting impact on university or society? One task might be to develop a more nuanced understanding of ‘impact’. Could the Humanities themselves have a greater impact within and beyond universities and how might they demonstrate their relevance? Lively exchanges between IAS and Centre directors emphasized that the disciplines themselves remain embedded in larger public enterprises.
