"The Humanities After 2016: What Do We Want to Become?" - Faculty Book Celebration

Sidonie Smith, the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan

RSVPs appreciated; please click here

The year 2016 marked a dramatic turning point politically. Now, more than ever, the priority for scholars in the humanities must be to transform how we educate future generations of doctorally trained humanists for careers in the academy and throughout the larger humanities workforce.

We need a model of education that is adequate to the lived realities of the academy, now and to come; to the energies of students who choose to pursue a doctorate; and to the intellectual, affective and social attachments that drive the pursuit of excellence in scholarly inquiry and committed teaching. The “new normal” in the everyday life of academic humanists will require us to become intellectually nimble, energetically collaborative, pedagogically imaginative, and flexible in communicating our intellectual passions and our values in an era of open access and narrowing appreciation for liberal arts education. Transforming how we conceptualize academic work will contribute to creating a new narrative about how humanists work with others in the academy and how we contribute to the hard work, pleasures and reflective insights of humanities-related activities outside it.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Sidonie Smith is author of Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times, her contribution to the current academic conversation over the place of the humanities in the 21st century. She is a past president of the Modern Language Association of America (2010). Smith's fields of specialization are autobiography studies, narrative and human rights, feminist theories and women's studies in literature.

Ron Mallon
Associate Professor of Philosophy
The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Sowande’ Mustakeem
Assistant Professor of History and African and African-American Studies
Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016)

 

RELATED EVENT

Panel Discussion: “Identity Narratives in Anti-Identity Times”

Tuesday, February 7, 12 pm
Washington University, Olin Library, Room 142

featuring

Sidonie Smith, Faculty Book Celebration keynote speaker
Rebecca Wanzo, Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Melanie Micir, Assistant Professor of English
Erin McGlothlin, Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies
Long Le-Khac, Assistant Professor of English

RSVPs appreciated to cenhum@wustl.edu. Co-sponsored by University Libraries.