Faculty Dialogue: Examining the Role of Humanities Research on the Academic Landscape

By Jason Hollander

The humanities play a special role in the academic landscape—reaching into some segment of all disciplines. Research in this field has evolved dramatically over the past several decades. NYU Research recently spoke to Edward J. Sullivan, dean for the humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Science; Jane Tylus, vice provost for academic affairs; and Mariët Westermann, director, Institute of Fine Arts, to gain insight into how this happened and the current state of humanities research at NYU and beyond.

NYU Research: What exactly does “humanities research” entail?

Sullivan: Humanities research is an ongoing reassessment of methodologies. In the multitude of disciplines, such as religion, philosophy, music, performance, art history, and other fields, there are a great many ways in which researchers must go about their business—much of it having to do with actually understanding the physicality of things that one is studying. I am, for example, loath to write about things that I have not witnessed or at least witnessed some aspect of. Humanities scholars should be willing to engage completely with their disciplines. This means spending long hours in libraries and archives. But it also means the willingness to spend a lot of time — alone — ruminating on what the meaning of all your research actually is.

Tylus: Humanities research focuses on the production of knowledge, as do all academic fields. But I think it might be a little bit different from either the sciences or social sciences insofar as it also reflects on how knowledge gets produced. It’s both the “what” and the “how.” It examines how we come together as a community to create a field of knowledge or how we talk about what is human in our existence: through stories, music, philosophical argument.

Westermann: Humanities research entails a self-reflexive activity. The word research calls to mind digging through archives, reading books, and checking facts. But I think there’s also an enormous aspect of thought to humanities research. To ask what humanities research is also begs the question of the history of the humanities. I would probably say that it includes all forms of cultural production, expression, and communication. This is really quite extraordinary. All human activity over time and in all different locales is in theory within its domain.

You’ve all touched on an element of vastness to this subject matter. Is that a challenge in some ways when you’re trying to corral the thought process or the methodology for this research?

Sullivan: I think it’s very much of a challenge, particularly now. But it is very much a testimony to how much we must think about and absorb methodologies and how to negotiate between those different approaches to our fields of research which, in the past, may have been separated by barriers created by disciplinary limits or ‘turf concerns.’

So I think the humanist in the 21st century is very much obliged to not only look at a discipline like anthropology from a humanistic perspective but to really cross the line and to appropriate, if you will, or adapt some of the ways of approaching the discipline as a scientist or a social scientist would.

Westermann: This vastness that you mentioned, I believe it to be a strength. I think that the humanities respond to what goes on in society and so you could say that, for better or worse, each generation of scholars develops the humanities that they need. So I don’t think that the vastness is a problem.

How is humanities research conducted in 2006 different than the research done in 1996, 1986, or 1956?

Tylus: I think in the last 50 years one major change, especially in literary studies but also in other disciplines, is a reluctance to identify texts as objects unto themselves. Fifty years ago literary critics were largely engaged with the work of art in and of itself. Due to a number of social factors but also to certain influences from continental philosophy, now you open up the PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association) and find articles on literature and something else outside the field of literature, properly speaking: Chaucer and gender, not just Chaucer.

What sparked these new modes of thinking?

Tylus: Certainly part of it has to be the inclusion of women in the academy. In the late ‘70s I took a course in college on women in fiction which the department was very excited to offer us, and I think the only woman writer we read was Sylvia Plath. Otherwise we just looked at women in the works of male authors. But in the last 25 years the kinds of courses and research generated in the academy have changed enormously, reflecting a more diverse faculty.

Sullivan: Yes, it’s a piece of a much larger picture that I think we can trace back to the 1960s and 70s. The greater presence and impact of women in the academy beginning at that time as well as the salutary effects of the multicultural, ethnic, and gender-related movements of that era served to disrupt any stale notions of academic or humanistic ‘purity.’ It’s interesting to look at the types of Ph.D. dissertations that one reads as barometers of transformations in the humanities. I am just finishing reading a very interesting dissertation by a student who is writing nominally on religious imagery in Puebla, Mexico in the 18th century. It incorporates religious practice, psychoanalysis, architectural history, and social and political history. If I were reading it 20 years ago, it might have concentrated more on issues related to artistic form, color, and iconography, all of which are important within traditional art history but which have tended to take something of a back seat to more cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary issues.

Westermann: Yes, I think 1968 certainly comes to mind as a watershed in that all of a sudden it became imperative for faculty to listen harder to the kinds of questions that their students were asking. I think the new demographics of faculty and students developing at that time, the rise of state universities, and the broadening of access to education have been wonderful developments for the humanities. Listening to Edward’s description of that dissertation, I imagine that the advisors in 1968 would not have posed questions to this student in quite the way that allowed her to develop her dissertation in this fashion in 2006.

Tylus: Writing a dissertation is more difficult for students today. Of course, we’re still training students within distinctive disciplines. But students are rightfully intrigued by theory, historical critique, and many other factors. It’s an intellectually exciting time, especially for those working on dissertations, but in some cases I think it puts several years on the clock for those pursuing a Ph.D. One of our jobs as educators is to help students move outside the boundaries of their disciplines while ensuring that they do so in a productive and sensible way.

Sullivan: Yes, it does create serious challenges for students and faculty in terms of assessing how much attention to pay to elements of scholarship which are outside of one’s own discipline. I was recently at a conference listening to a paper by a very young scholar who obviously felt this burden very heavily and attempted to incorporate into her argument equal amounts of social history, anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, art history, and various other things in an un-digested way, and it ended on not-very-satisfactory terms. It seemed to point, as Jane just mentioned, even more directly to the fact that if you try to do everything you’ll end up misunderstanding and misrepresenting your actual goals.

Westermann: In some cases this means that we now have to make sure students obtain essential or central knowledge in a particular discipline. I think students in the 1960s were quite right to say, ‘Let’s attack these great books that you’re making us read.’ But the generation of 2006 is asking us, ‘Why don’t we get to read these great books? Shouldn’t we be reading them?’

With all the urgent needs regarding American security, economics, social issues, and public health, why is it also imperative for the humanities to be studied right now?

Tylus: Studying the humanities fosters tolerance for ambiguity and complexity. You need not only to think about humanistic topics like the history of religion or the history of conflict, but to appreciate the kind of training and inquiry that the study of humanities can really engage. I hate to say there’s never a right answer to a question, but there are multiple ways of gauging the importance of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be…’ speech, for example, or of understanding how this passage relates to the rest of the play and to the Elizabethan world. This helps to remind us how complex and highly nuanced are some of the basic issues of our time. We need to know not just about the religious and cultural complexities of the Iraqi war, who is fighting, and why, but also why there are no surefire quick answers.

Westermann: To me, the humanities study how people interact, how they define themselves in relation to others, and how they make sense of their world and of the larger world within which their own worlds are embedded. Those are vital questions in an age of polarized discourse and 24-hour news cycles, where complex issues are reduced to sound bytes. Humanities scholars offer us close analysis as well as a more distant perspective. I think we need critically trained voices perhaps more than ever.

Sullivan: The media in the United States seems to reinforce the self-reflexive and inward looking attitudes that regulate our daily lives. We expect to hear news about what is happening in the United States or in our local areas but very rarely do they offer us a window into anything beyond our borders. This is very dangerous. I think that is precisely the humanistic pursuit that creates a sensitivity toward things outside of ourselves, toward things outside of this society that are absolutely necessary in terms of the issues that you raised in this question, which are very important. People need to look outside themselves to what is happening elsewhere or what has happened elsewhere in the past. That is also why study abroad for students is so significant and so broadening.

Tylus: The humanities encompass a number of disciplines and one of them is the study of foreign languages. There are very few things that are more humbling than learning another language, learning to think outside yourself, learning to think as an “other.” As Mariët said, one of the things that the humanities enable is an understanding of the voices of others. Despite the fact that we throw out the word globalism all the time, I don’t think we often consider the meaning of true globalism or what true global awareness entails.

What is the role of the humanist in the general academic landscape? How are his/her goals different from a research scientist or economics scholar?

Westermann: I think that the question of truth is somewhat different for humanists than for scientists and social scientists. Perhaps a better way to put it is that predictive value is not at stake. Predictability is just not the driving force of the humanities. The humanities are a retrospective endeavor to make sense of things. I would say that in the Middle Ages or perhaps especially in the Renaissance the humanities would have been called rhetoric. That has a somewhat negative ring for us, but it really encompassed carefully produced and articulated thoughts about issues of human consciousness.

So it sounds like what you’re saying is that at root a humanist is always a philosopher.

Westermann: Well, we do get Ph.Ds.

Tylus: You do have to go away and reflect, whether it’s going to an archive or a museum or a library. I think this notion of moving away and reflecting and then coming back is really inherent in the kind of work we do. That said, I also sense that whereas scientists have their laboratories, our laboratory is the classroom and so teaching becomes the moment that we can discuss with our students the theory that we’ve been working on or this passage that we find particularly problematic. We don’t have our lab but we have this wonderful opportunity with students and it doesn’t matter if it’s a class of freshmen or advanced graduate students.

Sullivan: I also see other disciplines or other areas such as science or natural science as pursuing projects that are moving forward, on a continual path, whereas humanities absorbs the possibilities and the necessities of reconceptualizing the past—both the positive and negative past. It’s this constant going back and reassessing where we have been and what we were doing and how that past experience can be absorbed into a present world view.

How does humanities research inspire the creation of new ideas and forms of expression?

Sullivan: The principal way in which I feel I can inspire students is to pose the questions. I think giving them the facts is important but it’s on a much lower plane than posing questions that will compel them to come up with new answers. The openness of the humanist to ideas that are completely at odds with one’s own is one of the necessities for a good scholar and particularly for a good teacher. So it’s really those open-ended discussions that I find most important.

Westermann: I would say that artists and writers by the character of what they are and the functions they have in society are often very keen observers and readers. I think to make new works they mostly go to previous works, other artistic forms. In terms of inspiring new creations and creativity in our students, it is especially a matter of encouraging independence of mind, and to do that you have to give very carefully structured syllabi and literature lists. I find it very exciting to see students develop their own way through that vast universe of methodological possibility. It’s usually at the time that they get to their dissertations that you see them taking on a certain line of thought and developing it in a way that is interesting and productive for the material. That is the exciting part of teaching for me.

Tylus: I looked at the question a little bit differently, from the standpoint of to what extent our own research is creative, or how we can transform a focused scholarly monograph into a book or collection of essays that will reach a larger audience and not be restricted within the boundaries of a particular discipline. I think there are borders between research and creativity that can be blended in some very beautiful and exciting ways. And I think that for me some of the most inspiring researchers in the humanities write about a plethora of issues in ways that are not just for a very narrow slice of scholars in contemporary art, let’s say. We have a number of scholars here at NYU who move beyond their specialty to engage a broader educated public. I think that’s exciting for our students—to recognize that this is a possibility for them, too.