Faculty Perspective: What Are the Most Important Trends in Humanities Research?
NYU faculty members were recently posed the question “What do you believe to be the most important trends in humanities research? What are the particular challenges or opportunities for those conducting this work?” The following are their responses:Catharine Stimpson
Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Science
People often ask me, “What are the humanities? And, whatever they might be, why should we support them when there are so many other pressing issues today?”
One of the answers in which I believe most strongly is this: The humanities urge us to ask questions, and then to use the answers we receive to ask additional questions.
In this spirit, I ask the following:
1. Do you believe that things are more complicated than they seem? That we must probe beneath appearances and surfaces to understand “reality”?
2. Do you believe that the past influences the present? Not only in the case of individuals but also for cultures and societies?
3. Do you believe that we cannot understand ourselves unless we understand other cultures and societies? That we cannot understand our own language unless we understand “foreign” languages?
4. Do you believe that the arts are more than entertainment? That a poem, a song, a gospel choir, a symphony can express and embody truths and beauty? Are you interested in the connections among the arts, the media, and technology?
5. Do you believe that we must strive to read and hear complicated texts in all their subtleties and complexities?
6. Do you believe that we must explore ethical questions and positions as rigorously and relentlessly as possible?
7. Do you believe in the importance of rationality? Do you like to think about it in relation to the imagination and to compassion?
8. Do you believe that the human species is one that searches for and creates meanings, including religious meanings?
9. Are you willing to be surprised? To explore new perspectives, no matter how difficult they might be?
10. Do you believe that the unexamined life is not worth living? And that this statement itself needs to be examined?
If you answer “yes” to most or all of these questions, then you believe in the purpose of the humanities—in history, languages and literature, the study of the various arts, philosophy, and religion. You believe in the exercise of consciousness and conscience.
Welcome to the humanities in all their ruggedness, richness, historical importance, and excitement. In a time that exhibits both the insecurity of uncertainties and, in contrast, the rigid certainties of fundamentalisms, they are surely more relevant than ever before.
Amy Adler
Professor, School of Law
One unmistakable trend right now is toward collapsing the boundaries separating the various disciplines within the humanities. But perhaps less obvious is that boundaries are also dissolving between the humanities and other fields.
My work draws on the humanities to rethink law. In particular, by exploring the rich scholarship in the humanities on questions of representation, art, language, culture, gender, and sexuality, I seek to expose and undermine fundamental assumptions about free speech law.
We tend to think of law as rational and objective, based on a continually evolving, often contested, set of principles. I view the First Amendment, however, as a body of law that is weighed down with unacknowledged cultural baggage that is surprisingly irrational and contingent. I suggest an unusual conception of First Amendment law: free speech law governs culture, yet in surprising ways, culture also governs free speech law. Humanities scholarship is therefore crucial to understanding the legal questions surrounding free speech.
Ulrich Baer
Professor and Chair, Department of German, FAS
The humanities are charged with determining what qualifies the human as human in light of practices that seem to challenge 20th century norms of basic human rights and needs. Issues as diverse as female genital mutilation, suicide bombing, racial profiling, or stem cell research have been criticized as incompatible with a certain understanding of what makes us human. In our era of exaggerated differences between cultures and religions, a common yardstick is needed to judge such practices lest we lapse into moral relativism.
The humanities’ task today rivals in its urgency the formulation of a principle of reason as a guide for moral or legally enforceable conduct. The rapid advances in the sciences and current debates in politics and law must be flanked by a patient effort to rethink the basic conception of what makes us human, and what allows us to judge another’s actions as inhuman.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Chair, Department of Italian Studies, Professor of Italian Studies and History, FAS
I believe that interdisciplinarity is essential to the future of humanities research. By interdisciplinarity I mean both collaborative research among scholars of different disciplines and open-minded approaches to one’s own discipline(s). Of course, this kind of broad-ranging intellectual inquiry requires time for reading and reflection, as well as opportunities for meaningful intellectual exchange. Both can be hard to come by. Working groups and funded research collaborations are key to furthering this kind of research.
The humanities as a whole are severely undervalued in our culture. The interdisciplinary connections humanists are making with the sciences, for example, are not only pathbreaking but also a survival strategy for humanistic fields of inquiry. At the same time we must encourage innovation within our own disciplines, and lobby for the research funding and faculty positions that will encourage brilliant students to undertake academic careers.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
University Professor; Professor of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
The most exciting trend in humanities research is engagement with the arts and sciences. While this is not a return to the Renaissance ideal exemplified by an Athanasius Kircher or Leonardo da Vinci, it is an indication that curiosity still knows no bounds.
The artist David Wilson, prompted by the uncertainties of early science, creates the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Lawrence Weschler, author of creative non-fiction and director of NYU’s New York Institute for the Humanities, dedicates a book to Wilson’s museum. Art historians such as Barbara Stafford explore the history of scientific visualization, while historians of science such as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison trace the history of objectivity in relation to technologies of visualization. Edward Tufte, a proponent of “beautiful evidence,” illuminates the relationship between visual evidence and quantitative reasoning.
Art is a mode of inquiry. Science hard and soft, natural and social, pure and applied, is animated by qualities of imagination and ethical concerns of deep interest to artists and humanists alike. Engagement across these historical divides is one of the most exciting trends in the humanities today.
Jo Labanyi
Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, FAS
As a newcomer to NYU from Britain, I have been struck by the current debates in the U.S. about the ‘crisis’ facing the humanities—an issue in Britain in the 1990s allayed by the creation of a National Arts and Humanities Research Council. By offering grants comparable to those in the social sciences, these awards prioritized interdisciplinary projects, ‘normalizing’ collaboration among scholars from different departments, institutions, and/or countries. The availability of European Union funding, involving researchers from several EU countries, also encouraged collaboration.
I sense that the ‘lone scholar’ approach remains the norm in the U.S., on the false assumption that funding is not available for collaborative, interdisciplinary projects. My experience as associate dean for research at my former U.K. university also taught me that humanities scholars can learn from our science colleagues to ‘think big’. If it is increasingly difficult to get humanities scholarship published, it is, I suspect, because we are not sufficiently ambitious in formulating the scope of our research.
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Professor, Department of Art and Art Professions, Steinhardt School
The emergency of globalization in the past five years has produced a new centrality of visualized media that are transforming lived experience from the political crises caused by the Abu Ghraib photographs or the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, to the workplace that demands employee virtuosity, and the online digital mass visualized memory created by You Tube, Flickr, and Google.
This experience is characterized by contradictions. Visualized objects circulate with ease, even as the physical movement of people is increasingly restricted. The drive to visualize, perhaps epitomized by the transformation of the cell phone into a camera, is the sensory practice of globalization, which is at once a desire to circulate images and the commodification of those images. There is, then, an opportunity to produce a new engagement with the question of humanity that underlies the humanities. The challenge is to overcome the practical constraints on research incarnated in the disciplinary structures of universities, publishers, and professional organizations.
Jennifer Morgan
Associate Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, FAS
I believe the most important trend in research in the humanities is the call to interdisciplinarity. In its most fundamental intervention, interdisciplinarity requires the researcher and the student to make crucial decisions about the subject of their inquiries—first framing their research or study around a carefully articulated problem and then allowing the problem to shape methodologies. For students, interdisciplinarity becomes, in essence, an introduction to the disciplines and a tool through which they can make critical choices about the interpretive qualities of academic disciplines. For scholars, interdisciplinarity poses difficult challenges.
In my own work as an historian of early American slavery, I find myself reaching outside the discipline of history into literary studies, economics, cultural studies, art history, critical race theory, and feminist theory. I need to take the demands of all these disciplines seriously. To succeed in doing so is to engage the outer edge of analytic possibilities in relation to the current stage of critical knowledge production.
Laura Slatkin
Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Among the most striking trends in the humanities must surely be the ongoing shifts in disciplinary configuration, along with a growing interest in inter- and trans-disciplinary work; “globalization” is both a political-economic horizon and the condition of our research. For a classicist these developments are in many ways heartening: both new news and the oldest news in our field, which at its best has aspired to interdisciplinary rigor and cross-cultural range.
It is also true that the humanities have lost status and students vis-a-vis the social and natural sciences; an economistic discourse of knowledge production reigns more or less unchallenged. Liberal education must either find a new footing or continue its fall into a deepening historical chasm. Students, scholars, and citizens committed to a reconstructed humanities need to think about the relation of “the liberal arts”—the old sense of the humanities—to democratic citizenship, to new and difficult ways of being in the world.