As long as there have been cities, they have existed in complex relationship to the countryside; bound together in networks of trade and migration, politics and warfare, they have also been pitted against each other. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s condemnation of cities as centers of female-led corruption to Karl Marx’s dismissal of the idiocy of rural life, city and countryside have been strategically defined with and against each other and have worked as complex signifiers in myriad social, cultural and political debates.

What is health and what is disease? What institutions generate or impede health? Who has access to the healthiest environments and what makes those environments healthy? How do communities construct, maintain or discipline health in individual bodies? These are questions that have been central to scholarship in the health humanities as well as other disciplines.

Money--what it is, how it works, who has it and who doesn’t--has concerned thinkers and researchers both inside and outside academia, and across a wide range of disciplines. It surrounds us and is a fundamental aspect of modern human life, shaping transactions and interactions and powering networks of ideas, material objects, and myriad cultures and subcultures.

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.