Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

One of NYU’s most undeniably distinctive features is its urban identity. Ours is not a hermetically sealed campus, but a school whose very buildings are integrated into the city around it—while offering their inhabitants a place, every day, where they can partake in the life of the mind. This, it seems to me, is what the humanities at their best offer us: both a space of reflection on our world and the invitation to interact constructively with it.

In the past few years, we’ve seen tremendous growth in programs that make those connections between the university and the city and world we live in. Some of those groups—the NY Institute for the Humanities, the Hemispheric Institute, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality—have been vital in forming connections between the university and the local and global communities beyond it. At the same time, we have been fortunate to have brought within our fold in recent years outstanding new faculty in the arts and the humanities whose creative work exemplifies these bridges.

Humanistic inquiry is often a solitary process, as many of us carry out our work in archives, libraries, and increasingly on computers. We scribble in the margins of “real” books and e-books, puzzle over a Bach cantata or a painting by Picasso, wrestle with syllogisms or declensions. The Humanities Initiative nurtures that immersion in the solitude of thinking and working, while offering a number of opportunities for humanists to think and work together.

Created in 2007, the Humanities Initiative has as its goal the strengthening of the humanities at NYU. It does so in a number of ways—making what we do more visible; helping us find kindred spirits around campus; supporting our work in the classroom and in the archive; articulating the importance of the humanities to the NYU community and the community at large.

One particularly special endeavor of the Initiative is the selection of a yearly cohort of NYU faculty and graduate students who dedicate themselves to building a cross-campus community as they share their work with each other and with various groups both in and outside NYU. In 2009-2010, faculty and students from Arts and Science, Tisch School of the Arts, and Steinhardt will be immersing themselves in projects ranging from an examination of the costs and benefits of the sonic dimension of the war in Iraq and an exploration of textual cultures and practices of devotion in 12th-century monasticism, to a study of Moses Mendelssohn's theological-political thought, an analysis of publicity and religious violence in Gujarant, and an investigation of celluloid orphans and the melodrama of Sinophone film history (1943-1973). 

Equally exciting and innovative projects will be undertaken by our other grant recipients. Five faculty pairs will make important research and curricular contributions in the areas of human rights, media, manuscript studies, style (fashion and manners), and drama by offering courses on Human Rights, Health, and the Environment; Audiovision: Sound and Listening in Film and Other Media; Women and the Book: Scribes, Artists, and Readers from Late Antiquity through the Fourteenth Century; The Politics of Style; and Staging Ancient Drama: Text, Culture, and Performance.

And five new Working Research Groups will be meeting regularly to discuss issues relevant to health, humanities, and culture; ideologies of slavery: Mediterranean studies; music and audio research; and technologies of mediation. I urge you to contact the directors of these groups if you would like to be involved.

Last year we started two new exciting programs: NYU Lectures in the Humanities, a series of co-sponsored lectures with individual departments and schools, and Great New Books in the Humanities, a series of book launches featuring books published by NYU humanities faculty. Quentin Skinner (University of London) and Hazel Carby (Yale University) were among our distinguished lecturers, and we launched the recent publications of several faculty members including Kim Phillips-Fein (Gallatin), Hasia Diner (Department of Hebrew and Judiaic Studies, FAS).

Finally, I am happy to report that we have begun our second year in our beautiful home at 20 Cooper Square. We have a dedicated seminar room, a library for our graduate fellows, and shared office space for our faculty fellows. If you have not yet had a chance to visit us, I look forward to welcoming you there for this year's talks and activities.

Jane Tylus