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2008-09 – Disciplinarity The last two decades were the age of interdisciplinarity. Across the humanities and the arts, traditional boundaries were challenged and often dissolved. Important new formations - from fields like cultural studies to genres like multi-media installation - were the result. And yet, there is a widespread sense that disciplinarity still matters. Institutionally, it continues to govern graduate education as well as hiring and promotion. Intellectually, too, it very much holds sway. Not only are there few humanists and artists willing to discard the methods and approaches developed in their fields, but many of them anchor their scholarly and artistic practice in a critical engagement with disciplinary pasts. The result is an active moment for the rethinking of disciplinarity. This process will not lead to a return to the strict separation between fields that characterized the mid-twentieth-century academy. Rather, it promises to forge a new constellation, what some imagine as a "post-interdisciplinary" field. The IPRH’s choice of disciplinarity as the annual theme for 2008-09 reflects the program’s commitment to the ongoing investigation of the conditions of humanistic scholarship and artistic production. It also dovetails with the campus’s engagement with questions of disciplinarity. That engagement ranges from the infrastructural expansion of knowledge production and the promotion of innovative research to the active rethinking of institutional organization and the trajectories of academic careers. The theme of disciplinarity may be central to the project, or a significant underlying assumption that drives its inquiry. The project may be about these meta-issues surrounding disciplinarity, about the specifics of a single discipline, or about disciplinarity as a component of an individual project. In short, the IPRH welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments. We seek faculty and graduate students in a wide variety of areas of humanistic inquiry whose projects reflect on the question of disciplinarity in all its varieties. The topic should also provide an opportunity for artists to consider the relevance of disciplinarity in their creative practice. The IPRH encourages applications from all sectors of the university with an interest in interdisciplinary and humanities-inflected research 2007-08 – Rupture The question of rupture is central to any humanistic
inquiry. Particularly in the wake of the historicist turn, it is
foundational to the very formation of the object of study; to understand any
product of the human intellect presupposes fixing it in a temporal order.
Periodicity, depending as it does on the concept of rupture, organizes
contemporary scholarship in the humanities. 2006-07 – Beauty The question of beauty has been a mainstay of humanistic
thought across space and time. It features prominently in Plato's theory of
mimesis and Confucius's teachings on enjoyment in moral and political
education. It preoccupied Aquinas and was a guiding principle in medieval
Japan. It became systematized in western thought with the formal development
of aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste. To this
tradition, we owe an ongoing preoccupation with judgment and criticism, the
sublime and the ugly, imagination and pleasure. While thinkers like Kant and
Schiller emphasized the unencumbered play of the imagination, a contrasting
tradition, reaching from Hegel to Bourdieu, stressed historical and cultural
specificity. Such tensions between universalism and particularism complicate
any inquiry into the basic epistemological question: how can we know that
something is beautiful? With modernism, moreover, the very ideal of beauty
came under attack. Much 20th-century art, music, and literature actively
defied the beautiful. In theoretical terms, this position was codified by
Marxist critics like Benjamin and Adorno, who regarded certain forms of
beauty with political and aesthetic suspicion. Feminist and anti-colonial
thinkers expanded on this critique of kitsch, identifying ideologies of
beauty as central sites of systemic oppression. But while the pursuit of
beauty was antithetical to serious creative work for much of the 20th
century, it seems to be making something of a comeback in the 21st. In a
postmodern world where composers return to tonality and artists rediscover
painting, the distinction between high and popular culture has effectively
evaporated. Whether the attendant retreat into aesthetics should be
critiqued as a reactionary move or celebrated as a strategic response to the
geopolitical transformations of the post-9/11 order is just one of the many
questions beauty continues to pose today. 2005-06 – Belief Belief is a foundational category of human existence. It suffuses every aspect of life from the sacred to the secular, from the banalities of everyday experience to the greatest depths of philosophical reflection. Belief reaches across the most diverse domains; yet its many meanings seem to divide into two broad categories. (1) Belief appears in conjunction with religion – an infinitely complex and varied phenomenon that has accompanied, perhaps even constituted, human existence across space and time. Research on belief systems continues to be undertaken from antiquity to the present. But no question seems more pressing than the relation between religion and modernity. In its western incarnation, the enlightenment promised to usher in an age of secularism. Centuries later, it is clear that this promise failed to materialize. Religion, in fact, seems on the rise globally, posing the issue of simultaneity of faith and reason, of magic and science, and urging a rethinking of the very categories we use to think about the current political and cultural situation. (2) Belief also has wide and varied functions beyond the field of religion. In the broadest sense, it denotes our conviction or acceptance that certain things are true or real. This expansive sense reaches into all aspects of human experience, where it seems to govern daily activities as much as any form of scientific inquiry. Recently, however, the presuppositions of this form of belief have come under considerable scrutiny. Poststructuralist theory has undermined the ontological foundations of such concepts as “truth” and “reality.” Meanwhile, trends in postmodern aesthetics have shaken modernist convictions in the purity of artistic form. If the belief in belief seems to be waning from the humanities and interpretive social sciences to the creative arts, there are also signs that belief continues to be resurgent and emergent in myriad forms, both familiar and unforeseen. The IPRH welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments. We seek faculty and graduate students in a wide variety of areas of humanistic inquiry whose projects reflect on the complexities of belief across space and time. The topic should also provide an opportunity for artists and writers to consider the constitutive yet shifting status of belief in the world we inhabit. The IPRH encourages applications from all sectors of the university with an interest in interdisciplinary and humanities-inflected research. 2004-05 – Difference Difference is constitutive of the human experience. On the most basic level, it operates through sets of oppositions that make cognition possible. In social life, it structures all meaningful distinctions from kinship relations to systems of justice and inequality. In the realms of culture, it creates meaning, whether through language or the arts. Rarely neutral, difference is suffused with forms of power and hierarchy that create and contain human subjects in various contexts. Race, ethnicity, class, and gender are some of the distinctions that become more salient through the deployment of difference. Difference structures such domains as the body, age, and sexuality. It engenders binaries like past/present, normal/abnormal, nature/culture, primitive/civilized, metropole/colony, center/periphery, high/low, harmony/dissonance, and virtual/real. It organizes intellectual fields from aesthetics and ethics to literature and history. Globalization heightened the stakes of difference. In the global arena of transnational capital, post-national politics, and ever-increasing population flows, such distinctions as good vs. evil, secularism vs. religion, and hegemony vs. empire now appear even more important. The IPRH welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments. Difference is a topic that will allow faculty and graduate students in a wide variety of areas of humanistic inquiry to work on projects that reflect on constructions of meaning in the lives of individuals and collectivities. The topic should also provide an opportunity for artists and writers to reflect upon the constitutive status of difference in the world we inhabit. The IPRH encourages applications from all sectors of the university with an interest in interdisciplinary and humanities-inflected research. 2003-04 – Violence We will invite applications for academic projects which will consider the term in all its meanings and in its myriad manifestations: psychic and material, individual and collective, occasional and endemic. Daily lives across the globe are molded by violence; individuals, institutions, as well as larger collectivities are also subjected to inequalities of power and socio-economic opportunity whose violence is less visible. Artistic and literary texts bear witness to the astonishing variety of violence that saturates human communities; they also testify to the power of the imagination to resist, as well as to recover from, violence. Psychologists have long probed the motivations of violence; philosophers have found in violence the subject of some of their most moving and powerful enquiries. Historians have documented egregious acts of violence even as they have sought to understand the broader role of conflict in historical transformations. Political theorists have tracked, inter alia, the ways in which nation-states have sought to confirm their legitimacy by claiming the sole right to violence; economists have debated the violence done to populations across the globe by socio-economic inequalities internal to, and between, nations. The language of the law has a great deal to say about violence, indeed language itself – and the interactions between languages – encodes the violent histories that structure the divides of gender, race, and religious difference. In sum, violence has been at the center of human life and humanistic enquiry; to think of the former is to understand the value and necessity of the latter. The IPRH welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments. “Violence” is a topic that will allow faculty and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines across the humanities, arts, and social sciences to develop ideas and scholarship that reflect on the place of violence in the lives of individuals and collectivities. The topic should also provide an opportunity for artists and writers to reflect upon the interconnections between violence and creativity. The IPRH welcomes applications from all sectors of the university with an interest in interdisciplinary and humanities-inflected research. 2002-03 – The South
The
IPRH theme for the year 2002-03 is "The South." This is a term that
can be understood in various ways. It surfaces, for instance, in transnational
geopolitical description (North-South relations, South-South cooperation, North
and South America). It indicates differences and divisions internal to
nation-states (the U.S. South, southern Italy, north and south India--such
examples can be multiplied). Its colloquial forms (“going south,” “south
of the border”) are produced by, and regenerate, views of cultural geography
organized around the north/south binary. The concept of ‘southernness” was
crucial to early modern discussions of the historical, climatological and
representational contrasts between a "hardy" northern Europe and
"effeminized," luxuriant Mediterranean cultures (this opposition, of
course, was the prelude to the extension of these ideas across large sections of
the globe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the wake of, and as a
justification for, empire). The term also took on a powerful currency after the
"discovery" of the South Sea islands and cultures in the eighteenth
century. Since then, the islands of the Southern Hemisphere have provided fecund
grounds for anthropological and historical inquiry, including by those who study
settler colonialisms. In sum, the “South” may be taken to represent varied
forms of cultural, geographical, moral or political difference.
2001-02 – The Means of Reproduction "The Means of Reproduction" covers an extraordinarily wide range of cultural phenomena. From cloning to photocopying, from bibliography to biochemistry, "reproduction" has become one of the most ubiquitous and contested terms of our time. We intend the term to be construed as broadly as possible, so that it is understood to include all the possible technological, biological, and cultural means by which organisms, societies, institutions, and commercial concerns engage in processes of reproduction. Fellowship applicants to the IPRH may therefore focus on, for example, new technologies and their challenges to intellectual property law; preliterate cultures and their maintenance of social forms and rituals; the work of art in the age of mechanical – or electronic – reproduction; the politics of prenatal care and the regulation of human reproductive practices; or the history of scholarly editing and translation. Our purpose, in short, is to attempt to put scholars from disparate disciplines, with disparate senses of the word "reproduction," into productive dialogue. 2000-01 – Cities This topic of "Cities" embraces a broad range of social phenomena, historical periods, and academic disciplines: from the walls of Jericho to the skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur, from the fashions of Carnaby Street to the favelas of São Paulo, from Augustine's City of God to Mike Davis's City of Quartz. The IPRH will accordingly entertain all approaches and all schools of thought that help illuminate the role of cities as symbols and centers of human endeavor; we welcome applications not only from the traditional disciplines in the arts and humanities, but from disciplines less often served by humanities institutes, such as architecture, sociology, geography, economics, or urban and regional planning. 1999-00 – Institutions of the Visual The theme "Institutions of the Visual" covers a wide array of cultural phenomena. We will consider, for instance, applications dealing with aesthetic theories and/or political dictates that affect the canons of visual representation and the limits of what can be shown; museums, galleries, archives, or other cultural establishments that serve as vehicles for the preservation and commodification of visual art; and the apparatus of human sensory perception itself, which, by means of technological mediation or by means of the "naked eye," physically determines how we see. The IPRH will consider all approaches and all intellectual traditions that help illuminate how "the visual" has been constructed, understood, and mediated in myriad historical epochs and cultural contexts. 1998-99 – Diaspora, Identity, and Expressive Culture The topic of "Diaspora, Identity, and Expressive Culture" includes a broad spectrum of subjects, ranging from the problems faced and posed by immigrant workers in the new Germany, to the rich artistic and musical traditions of the black and Latin Caribbean, to the historical transformations and cultural continuities of Judaism. The IPRH will entertain all approaches and intellectual traditions that contribute to the illumination of the complex intersections of art, individual subjectivity, group identity, and global migration. |
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