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 Institute for Public Knowledge, 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.

Our new digs at 20 Cooper Square have enabled us to become a genuine hub for humanities activities. Last year alone saw the Humanities Initiative hosting over thirty events, including an address by NEH Chairperson James Leach (co-sponsored by the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress), two packed workshops on grant-writing (co-sponsored by GSAS and the Center for Teaching Excellence), two panels – also packed – on violence and the humanities, and a conference on the telescope to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s “discovery” of the satellites of Jupiter (see our Gallery for lots of pictures and our Archive for a list of all our past events). This year promises even more: a conference in November on “Ambience in the  Humanities” with a keynote speech by Geoffrey Harpham, Director of the National Humanities Center; our Humanities Festival in the spring on “Memory, Shmemory,” with the NY Institute for the Humanities; and a new round of workshops on grants and jobs in the humanities.  Stay tuned!

One 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 2010-11, faculty and students from Arts and Science, Tisch School of the Arts, The Silver School of Social Work, and Steinhardt will be immersing themselves in projects such as the impact of the Sack of Rome on European literature, Russian modernism, Hume’s view of the self, and the philosophical foundations of social work. For the first time, we are thrilled to be co-sponsoring an ACLS post-doctoral fellow, who will be teaching in the department of history and working on a project on Biblical literalism.  We are also pleased to have two honorary fellows with us this year: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, from Pomona College, and Myra Jones-Taylor, who has just finished her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale and who is a faculty fellow/assistant professor in Social Work.

Equally exciting and innovative projects will be undertaken by our other grant recipients. A slate of new courses is being offered this semester as faculty are joining together in team-taught courses such as “Women and the Book: Scribes, Artists and Readers from Late Antiquity through the Fourteenth Century” and “Staging Ancient Drama: Text, Culture, and Performance.”  And six new Working Research Groups will be meeting regularly to discuss the digital humanities, translation studies, the Roman figure of Lucrece and her legacy, Freud, theories of sound, and the new issues in the history of science.  They in turn join previous working groups focusing on 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.

Two years ago 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. Talks and book launches proceeded apace last year and this fall we are already on target to celebrate books by Marion Nestle (Steinhardt), Jacques Lezra (FAS, Comparative Literature), Jordana Mendelson (FAS, Spanish), and Dale Jamieson (FAS, Philosophy and Environmental Studies) as well as to host talks by Harry Berger (UC-Santa Cruz) and Alberto Toscano (U. College, London) – with much more to come.  We welcome as always suggestions by faculty, administrators, students and staff regarding future events.

As we begin our third year in our beautiful home at 20 Cooper Square – with its dedicated seminar room, a library for our graduate fellows, and shared office space for our faculty fellows – I look forward to learning still more about the research and teaching interests of our many humanists at NYU and the way those interests intersect with the rest of the university and the city itself. If you have not yet had a chance to visit us, I look forward to welcoming you during the 2010-11 academic year.

Jane Tylus