February 5,
2007
Humanities Project reveals vitality of academic life
through art, dialogue
Seligman renews and increases funding for
initiative
An exhibit featuring works by African-American artist
Carrie Mae Weems (an image from her video project Italian Dreams is
pictured above) and a talk about the war on terror by law expert David Cole
(below) on February 20 are among the events sponsored this month through
the Humanities Project.
In Thomas Gibson’s course about Islam and global
politics this spring, he is challenging his students to consider the
“war on terror” in terms of narrative. He wants them to think
not just as anthropologists but also as literary critics, historians, and
religious scholars—in other words, from an interdisciplinary point
of view.
“No one really knows what narrative to place the
current ‘war on terror’ in,” he says. “And when
something really new emerges in history, people look for
analogies.”
Gibson and his students chart the emergence of
analogies through which scholars, pundits, bloggers, and others are seeking
to make sense of current events. Pearl Harbor, European fascism,
colonialism—different comparisons have been tried on for size, but,
like all analogies, none is a perfect fit.
“One of the most fascinating things for me as an
anthropologist is how people have to interpret something that resists
interpretation,” notes Gibson, professor and chair of anthropology.
“I freely admit I haven’t decided myself which analogy makes
sense. It’s my job in the course to open up to students the range of
analogies that are available.”
This spring Gibson’s students are not the only
ones who have the chance to consider issues such as these. The Humanities
Project, an initiative that spotlights interdisciplinary work through a
series of events that are open to the public, offers the entire University
community an opportunity to add to the discussion. This year’s
program features 10 projects in areas ranging from the archive in the
digital age to transatlantic modernism. The projects, many of which are
supplemented by classes such as Gibson’s, include exhibitions, film
screenings, and guest lectures—a total of 40 events scheduled for
the academic year.
“The humanities are central to the life of the
College,” says Peter Lennie, the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean
of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. “The Humanities
Fund has done much to highlight the vitality and distinction of what is
happening here, and I am delighted that it will continue.”
President Seligman agrees. That’s why he
recently announced he will renew and extend the Humanities Fund for the
duration of his presidency. Seligman established the fund out of the
President’s Venture Fund in 2006 and made a one-year commitment of
$100,000 to the Humanities Project. Now he has committed $150,000 a year
for the remainder of his time as president. The fund will be
administered by Lennie.
“I was enormously pleased by the impressive
projects that began during the initial year of the Humanities Fund,”
Seligman says. “I believe that this fund will contribute to the
strengthening and the vitality of the College’s wonderful humanities
programs.”
An example of the funding in action is All about Eve, an exhibit
of work by African-American artist Carrie Mae Weems on view in Hartnett
Gallery from February 8 through March 9. The exhibit is part of the
“Visualizing the Humanities” project.
Weems, who has shown her work at the Museum of Modern
Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other museums, uses
photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, and video to explore
themes related to gender, race, and human relationships. Hartnett Gallery
will be one of the first galleries in the United States to show her new
video project Italian Dreams.
“In all of her work, Weems addresses the complex
formal and political issues surrounding African-American culture and
focuses on the ways in which images shape our perceptions,” says
Hartnett Gallery director Derek Rushton, a doctoral student in the Visual
and Cultural Studies program. “Using narrative as a
‘counterpoint’ to imagery, she recounts stories and myths and
invents texts.”
Other events planned this month will focus on the
“war on terror,” including a talk on February 20 in Hoyt
Auditorium by civil liberties expert David Cole. A professor of law at
Georgetown University, Cole is author of Enemy
Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terror and Terrorism and the
Constitution. He also is the legal affairs
correspondent for The Nation and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All
Things Considered.
Cole
Cole is just one of many experts to take part in the
“Law and the ‘War on Terror’” project, an
examination of effects this new war is having on political, civil,
personal, and military institutions. Gibson’s course, one he
originally developed in response to the events of September 11, 2001, also
is part of the project.
For political science major Colin Brown, the course
has proved invaluable for his Take Five project on Muslims in Western
countries. He spent the fall interviewing Muslim Moroccan immigrants in the
Netherlands and says the course—with its emphasis on how frameworks
for explanation are created, sustained, and revised—helped sensitize
him to the perspectives from which his native-Dutch and immigrant
interviewees spoke.
Gibson applauds the interdisciplinary focus of the
Humanities Project, which he says has “stimulated a lot of contacts
that might not have happened otherwise.”
For Brown, the Humanities Project is especially
valuable for its inclusiveness. “These issues affect everyone,”
he says. “It’s nice if you can take a seminar to talk about
them, but it’s good that this opens it up to the University and
community, so there’s an opportunity to have a discussion that
involves everyone.”
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