[Wesleyan University]
Photograph of the Center for Humanities building

2010/2011 Center for the Humanities Themes:

Worlding (Fall 2010)

 In the past three decades, the traditional study of national history, literature, and culture has been critically challenged by the recognition of border-crossing transnational and global flows. More recently, "world history" and "world literature" have emerged from the debates, in turn, to challenge the existing semantic domain of categories such as the national, international, multinational, transnational, and global. One impulse behind this shift is the perception that even transnational and globalization models reinforce nationalist assumptions, foreclosing on polycentric perspectives. The addition of variants of the "worldly" to this domain of inquiry has fostered contestations as well as opportunities. Recent projects offer reformulations of "world" literature (D.Damrosch; F.Moretti),  "world" history (J. Bentley and C. Bayley), and "world" social systems (I. Wallerstein, L. Abu Lughod), as have debates on "world" music and "world" religions. Any apparent convergence around the concept of "World" is misleading, however, for there is as yet no methodological consensus and numerous avenues of research are being pursued in a range of disciplines.

 The Center invites applications from all disciplines in which the notions of "world” have become distinct if contested categories. What is driving this emergence? What are the challenges it poses to more traditional concepts and avenues of research? What new questions does it enable? What earlier problems does it address and what new ones does it create?

 Genealogies of Reason (Spring 2011)

 In an era of recurring financial crises and political instability, debates over how to interpret and respond to our changing circumstances often circle back to the same fundamental questions: just how rational are people?  Just what does "rationality" mean? Contemporary thinking on major problems of ethics, economics, and politics often takes for granted the nature of rationality even as they insist upon its explanatory power and normative value. The notion of "reason" is seldom a topic of inquiry itself.  Our contemporary moment suggests the importance of interdisciplinary exploration of various genealogies of reason - from the ancient Greek concept of logos (often translated "reason") through to modern, formal rational choice theories that have proliferated throughout the human and natural sciences.  Recent histories of reason and rationality have complicated conventional understandings by tracing their situated contingency, moral virtues, rhetorical forms, and relation to governmentality while inquiries into the nature of affect challenge the assumed independence of reason and subjectivity.

The Center invites applications from all disciplines in which conceptions of reason and rationality are operative or interrogated. What is reason? How has our understanding of this crucial term of cognition changed? What problems regarding reason have emerged and what new understandings of reason (or alternatives) might come from these critical studies?