Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

Beyond Empire

Our project examines the currently dense and potentially paradigm shifting intersections of Middle Eastern Studies and American Studies. While area studies departments are by nature highly interdisciplinary, the mapping of regional expertise in the academy often inhibits cross-regional examinations of complex historical moments. Our partnership will work towards creating new paradigms of knowledge production that can help in developing new courses, the training of graduate students, support faculty research, and create public programming for the wider university community.

In January 2007, President Bush defined his strategy shift in Iraq as “the re-Americanization of the effort.” While the formation of a New Middle East is posited as the ultimate goal of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the imperial impulse has multifarious domestic implications as well. In both rhetorical and manifest ways, the US and the Middle East have become increasingly imbricated societies. Exploring the interplay between domestic and international spaces, our working group will examine recent theoretical writings on empire and set them in dialogue with current efforts to remap the transnational dimensions of U.S culture. Within this general framing, we will focus on three areas: gender and sexuality; law and torture; transitions to democracy.

Professor Lisa Duggan
Director, American Studies Program
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
Faculty of Arts and Science

Shiva Balaghi
Associate Director, The Hagop Kervorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
Faculty of Arts and Science

Ethics of the Sensible: New Political Perspectives on Music and the Arts

Ethics of the Sensible gathers scholars from music studies, performance studies, language and literature, political theory, and philosophy to examine the relationships between art and contemporary political problems, with a special focus on sonic arts, dance and performance art, and contemporary poetry. Adopting a critical position vis-à-vis claims that art is inherently political, that communities formed around it are political, or that scholarly writing on art constitutes a political intervention, the group questions: (a) what it means to think works of art aesthetically at all; and (b) how the political must be understood in order for it to be hospitable or hostile to the aesthetic.

To pursue these questions, we introduce “the sensible” (after Jacques Rancière) to designate the ways in which anything can or cannot be self-evidently perceived at any point of history or place in the world. Power differentials between individuals, institutions, and communities result partly from the simultaneous participation in and partition of the sensible. The sensible subsumes the aesthetic. The arts may well constitute a paradigmatic distribution of the sensible across social fields which it in turn helps constitute. But we take it as an ethical decision to interrogate that assumption philosophically and to investigate and document its history.

Andre Lepecki
Associate Professor Department of Performance Studies
Tisch School of the Arts

Lytle Shaw
Assistant Professor Department of English
Faculty of Arts and Science

Jairo Moreno
Associate Professor Department of Music
Faculty of Arts and Science

Experimental Cuisine: The Kitchen as an Intersection of Science and the Humanities

This working group, also known as the Experimental Cuisine Collective, convenes scholars, scientists, chefs, writers, journalists, and performance artists—colleagues from NYU and the wider community. Our overall aim is to develop a broad-based and rigorous academic approach that employs techniques and approaches from both the humanities and sciences to examine the properties, boundaries, and conventions of food. Topics will include, but are not limited to, notions of taste, texture, smell; boundaries of edible and inedible; dining rituals and food taboos. Through these explorations we will address such questions as: What are the scientific principles that direct and determine which foods we eat? What are the technical and cultural foundations that give rise to a new cuisine? How can food chemistry enhance and contribute to food aesthetics? How can the manipulation of chemical components of food alter notions of edible and inedible? How have chemical descriptions of food cons
tituents come to be viewed in almost exclusively negative terms, and how does this affect the way the public (especially children) views food science and chemistry? How can these scientific and cultural aspects of food chemistry fit into existing discussions of food safety and sustainable agriculture that are at the forefront of debate in the realm of public health and politics?

Amy Bentley
Associate Professor Interim Chair, Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health
The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education,
and Human Development

Kent Kirshenbaum
Assistant Professor Department of Chemistry
Faculty of Arts and Science

The Project on New York Writing

The Project on New York Writing seeks to generate significant new research and teaching about the place of New York writing in American literature and culture. We adopt a broad definition of “New York writing” to include writing by New Yorkers, writing that takes New York to be its subject or setting, or simply even writing produced in New York. We use the term “writing” in contradistinction to the term “literature,” because the Project’s purview will extend beyond the genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and literary nonfiction to embrace such other textual forms as song lyrics, journalism, and nonfiction of all kinds.

Interdisciplinary in its approach to literary and cultural studies, the Project will examine the evolution of New York City as a literary construct, as well as the city’s emergence and continual reinvention as one of the country’s ¬and the world’s ¬premier sites of literary and cultural production. Seeking to understand how New York’s cultural products, its history, and even its physical spaces might be understood to function as texts that respond to modes of literary analysis, the Project will seek to demonstrate that literary scholarship can provide a vital foundation for a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Several public events will take place during spring 2008. Details will be announced on this site. This phase of the project will culminate in a conference to be held at NYU in spring 2009, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Hudson’s and Champlain’s explorations of the Hudson River, which paved the way for the Dutch settlement of the Hudson Valley, and the 200th anniversary of the publication of Washington Irving’s History of New York.

Associate Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell
Director of Undergraduate Honors
Department of English
Faculty of Arts and Science

Associate Professor George Shulman
Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Visual Culture

As a field of study, visual culture investigates the intersections of media, art, advertising, science, and news. While the field originally emerged out of art history, it is defined today by its interdisciplinary study of images across diverse media (such as photography, television, and film), new media (such as the Web and digital imaging), architecture, design, and art (including traditional media such as painting and sculpture as well as new multimedia art forms) across a range of social arenas, including news, art, science, advertising, and popular culture. The field of visual culture grows increasingly important in our contemporary context, in which the issues raised by visuality and images in relation to globalization, new media, and the new metropolis are at the forefront of contemporary debate. The increased relevance of this field of study lies precisely in its interdisciplinary emphasis on issues of practices of viewership and the political and social impact of watching of all kinds. The study of visual culture emphasizes the role of visual media in everyday life and the importance of visual media in the dissemination of ideas in the public sphere.

Our goal is quite straightforward and simple: we will bring together a group of faculty and graduate students whose interests intersect with the study of visual culture in order to see what the commonalities among us are, what the differences might be, how the field looks from different disciplinary locations, and what kind of work is being done in the area now at NYU. In establishing the NYU-Steinhardt MA/PhD program in visual culture we have found these questions subject to controversy and hard to answer. This research group provides a means to set about defining what it is to practice visual culture at NYU, whether as an artist, a critic, an educator, or a student.

Nicholas Mirzoeff
Professor Department of Art and Art Professions
The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Marita Sturken
Professor Department of Culture and Communication
The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development