Scheduling of the visitors below in progress; they will set the main readings for each session. In addition, the seminar will work through a series of short readings week-by-week, addressing background questions of knowledge, experience, the disciplines, and the humanities. A sample of the latter, in a rough order, is given underneath the schedule below. Other texts may be added or substituted as our collective interests dictate and as conversations with visitors evolve. Specific readings for each week will be posted on the “Assignments” page.
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September 7: introduction
September 14: D. Graham Burnett, History and History of Science
September 21: Paize Keulemans, East Asian Studies
September 28: Marshall Brown, Architecture
October 5: Erin Huang, East Asian Studies
October 12: Devin Fore, German
October 26: Christy Wampole, French and Italian
November 2: Andrew Cole, English
November 9: Eddie Glaude, African American Studies
November 16: David Levine, Theater (Harvard)
November 23: open session
November 30: Martha Friedman, Lewis Center for the Arts, and Brooke Holmes, Classics
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The rough trajectory anticipated here will proceed from concepts of knowledge and of experience, to discipline and disciplinarity, to the idea of the humanities (with special reference to their relations with the arts). These texts will afford us some general concepts and histories, from a variety of perspectives, with which to approach the questions raised by our visitors.
Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish. Tr. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. (excerpt)
Pierre Bourdieu. Homo Academicus. Tr. Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. (excerpt)
Peter Burke. What is the History of Knowledge? Cambridge: Polity, 2016. (excerpt)
Wendy Brown. “Neoliberalized Knowledge.” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 1.1 (Summer 2011): 113-29.
Donna Haraway. “Situated Knowledges.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99.
Jerry A. Jacobs. In Defense of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. (excerpt)
Julie Thompson Klein and Robert Frodeman. “Interdisciplining Humanities: A Historical Overview.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 2nd edition, edited by Robert Frodeman, 144-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Will Bridges. “A Brief History of the Inhumanities.” History of Humanities 4.1 (2019): 1-26.
Saidiya Hartman. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): p 1–14.
Simon During. “Losing Faith in the Humanities.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. December 18, 2019.
Adrian Piper. “On Wearing Three Hats.” Adrian Piper Research Archive. 2007.
John Guillory. “Monuments and Documents.” History of Humanities 1.1 (2016): 9-30.
