Changing the Humanities / the Humanities Changing

Thursday, 16 July to Saturday, 18 July
Location: Gillespie Conference Centre, Clare College, Cambridge

‘Changing the Humanities / The Humanities Changing’ -- a major international conference funded by the Mellon Foundation -- was designed to investigate the standing and disciplinary formation of the Humanities today. Speakers looked comparatively and historically at the Humanities and the ways in which they relate to Science and Technology. The 800th anniversary of Cambridge offered a unique vantage point from which to view past changes during the University’s modernisation and relate them to current developments.

‘Leaps of Imagination’ launched the conference with a performance featuring the intersection of maths and music that teamed a Fields medallist, Tim Gowers, with Simon McBurney of Complicité. On the first full day, we heard about the interplay of innovation and conservatism in the evolution of Maths and Classics Tripos, including the ‘Great Slaughter’ that led to Cambridge reform, and the emergence of the Moral Sciences Tripos hand-in-hand with the Natural Sciences. Homi Bhabha’s keynote addressed the intractable problem of violence and the Humanities. His lecture provided an overarching structure linking the rhetoric of violence to the question of normativity central to Onora O’Neill’s keynote the following day. Bhabha emphasised the importance of institutions as sites for the exchange of ideas, as well as hospitality and convocation. For him, institutions like CRASSH were not so much centres as crossroads, while O’Neill argued for pedagogical changes to support the disciplinary and conceptual border-crossing that invigorates the Humanities.

A panel on origins and genealogies addressed the question of origins in Philosophy and forgotten genealogies (‘ghosts’) in Classics, juxtaposed with a panel focused on instances of disciplinary innovation--in the Cambridge Historical School in the 1960s  and social anthropology in the 1980s. featuring Quentin Skinner and Marilyn Strathern. Ideas of form in musicology and forgetting in film offered new ways to think about disciplines that have evolved belatedly or ahead of disciplinary change, while a ‘Comparativisms’ panel juxtaposed shifts from national to regional languages with questions of monolingualism and colonialism. James Chandler and Stefan Collini interrogated the  dialogue between criticism and history, considering cultural criticism in relation both to its own disciplinary histories and to historical events. Peter Hennessy and Richard Wilson called attention to the isolation of government from academia and the problems of horizon-scanning in governmental organisations: who anticipated climate change or modern terrorism?

Finally, we revisited C. P. Snow’s interventions into politics, education, and literature as the history of a ‘bad idea’, revising previous accounts of Government’s isolation with evidence of the contribution made by scientists to Government in the 20thC. Two public fora punctuated the conference: one on ‘The Humanities Today’, including the Chair of the Arts Council, and the other with Martin Rees, Onora O’Neill, and Richard Sennett. The first asked: why study and fund the Arts and Humanities today? The second argued that Science and the Humanities were equally divided between the ideal and the applied, useful or useless knowledge. Sociology, bridging the two, brought us back to our starting point, the cross-hatched world where science and humanities coexist and old debates take new forms.

The Robbins report identified the University’s threefold task as teaching, research, and reflective inquiry. ‘Changing Humanities’ highlighted the role of the Humanities Centre in signalling the importance of reflective inquiry within the University. Speakers cast a critical eye on disciplinary histories, their genealogies, and their cross-border controls and interactions. The papers demonstrated how disciplines construct themselves – the fantasies, over-determinations, and absences, as well as the rituals that bring scholarly communities together, and the forms of violence that accompany new turns in disciplinary thinking. In 2011 a follow-up conference will look forward to ‘The Future University’.