This is the body text for the 2008-2009 Fellows Theme.
Fellows during the 2006-07 Fellows program analyzed essential humanistic topics such as values, agency, and subjectivity as they change or disappear during times of political, economic, and/or societal upheaval.
During the 2007-2008 academic year the IHR Fellows projects demonstrated an expansive understanding of sustainability beyond its technological challenges by involving the long-term thinking, sense of history, attention to language and human creativity. Additionally theese projects revealed an understanding of cultural and social institutions that are indicative of humanities scholarship, as well as necessary for creating and critiquing notions of sustainable communities and societies.
The 2009-2010 theme, “Utopias/Dystopias and Social Transformation,” is designed to attract scholars whose work addresses the nature, value, and meaning of utopias/dystopias (or utopian/dystopian thought) for social transformation by utilizing the perspectives and methodologies, and preferably crossing the boundaries, of such humanities disciplines as history, literary studies, art history, film and media studies, philosophy, and/or religious studies. Appropriate projects might consider the following kinds of questions: What ARE utopian approaches to social transformation?
The purpose of the 2010-11 Institute for Humanities Research fellows theme is to engage humanities scholars from various disciplines in addressing and analyzing the role of the humanities in illuminating—and possibly enriching scientific inquiry into—human origins.
The purpose of the 2011-12 Institute for Humanities Research Fellowship is to engage humanities scholars from various disciplines in addressing and analyzing the role of the humanities in illuminating the interrelated concepts of immigration, migration, and movement, broadly conceived. One possible approach might bring humanities questions to bear on the often economically charged issue of immigration.
Now that the Enlightenment dream of generating perfectly rational human persons and utterly transparent social relations has crumbled, the humanities’ focus on human imaginary processes has become increasingly important. But the human imagination is a double-edged sword. On one side is the possibility that humanistic inquiry into myth, narrative, and metaphor will save humanity from the nightmare of destruction so frequently justified by rationalistic claims. On the other is the possibility that the imagination will condemn humanity to irrational delusions that are equally disastrous.
When Dorothy Gale utters the last line of The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home,” there seems little doubt that she speaks out of her joy at being safely ensconced on her family’s farm in America’s Heartland. However, Dorothy’s simple phrase is open to a wide variety of interpretations because of one word—home—that can connote security, belonging, memory, and comfort, or arouse feelings of dread, alienation, and pain.
Humanists have been central to reconsidering the active role that emotions play in the constructions of reason, truth, subjectivity and narrative.
The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin monstrum, meaning “something marvelous;” and ultimately from the verb monere, “to show and to warn.” In coordination with the multi-year celebration of the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the IHR fellows program for the 2015-2016 academic year will investigate what the eruption or suppression of the monstrous shows us about ourselves and our possibilities as humans, and what the warnings, disruptions, and abjections of the monstrous show us about our restless cultural imaginary.