The UCD Humanities Institute invites you to the first lecture in the 'Future of the Humanities' lecture series.
The focus of this series will be on the challenges facing the humanities, the innovations currently taking place and suggestions for the future. Each keynote speaker will be followed by responses by leading humanities scholars from Irish academic or cultural institutions.
LECTURE 1 – FRIDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2014 (Room H204, UCD Humanities Institute)
Professor Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, will give a lecture on:
The Future of the Academic and Public Humanities: The Changing Academic Environment in the U.S.
Abstract:
In the United States, the pressures on the academic humanities grow daily. Legislators demand utilitarian curricula; university administrators invest funds and faculty in the STEM disciplines; and students’ debt drives them to vocational courses. While defending the value of the arts, history, languages, literature, philosophy, and other traditional humanities disciplines, many North American academics are also beginning to experiment with imaginative collaborations—reaching out to other disciplines and inter-disciplines such as the health humanities, to public humanities organizations, to public policy makers, and to an often overlooked audience of non-academic readers and thinkers. Humanities centers can play a critical role in fostering interdisciplinary research and teaching, creative uses of technology, inter-institutional collaboration, and publicly engaged humanities scholarship and teaching. How can scholars who are accustomed to working alone and autonomously on individual projects adapt to collaborative projects and publicly engaged arts and community-based scholarship? One answer is to identify the disciplinary values we want to hold onto and to integrate those values when collaborative scholarship holds promise. The University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies offers one case study. Like many humanities centers, the Obermann Center strives to balance a commitment to support faculty and graduate arts, research, and scholarship with the demands and opportunities for higher education in a public university in the 21st century.
Respondents to Professor Mangum’s lecture are:
Professor Margaret Kelleher, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, UCD
Professor Patrick O’Donovan, Professor of French at University College Cork and Vice Chair, Irish Humanities Alliance
Professor Daniel Carey, Associate Director, Moore Institute, NUI Galway and Chair, Irish Humanities Alliance
SCHEDULE:
10.30 am – 10.45 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks by Professor Nicholas Daly (UCD School of English, Drama and Film)
10.45 am – 11.30 am: Professor Mangum Lecture
11.30 am – 11.45 am: Tea and Coffee
11.45 am – 12.30 pm Responses
12.30 pm – 1.00 pm: Questions and Answers
Places are limited so if you are interested in attending please RSVP to humanities@ucd.ie by Tuesday 25 November.