Context
With the institution of new technological curricula and an increasingly instrumental and utilitarian attitude towards Higher education amongst politicians, the role of the Humanities in the Academy has come under intense scrutiny. Doctoral programmes turn out scholars with PhDs who cannot find jobs appropriate to their training, and funding is diverted from Humanities subjects to more obviously useful forms of education. Recent books such as Alvin Kernan’s What’s Happened to the Humanities, John Ellis’s Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities, and Monika Fludernik’s Threatening the University: the Liberal Arts and the Economization of Culture proliferate: it is easy to participate in a sense that a major sector of the modern academy feels itself misunderstood, undervalued and under siege.
Is there really a ‘Crisis’ in the Humanities, or is it a necessary and continuing aspect of the role of the Humanities to reflect critically on themselves? What are ‘the Humanities’ in the modern university and how do they relate to the old ‘Liberal Arts’? Need the Humanities justify themselves, and how might they best do it?
Description
This theme considered the history, present position and possible future roles for the Humanities in the Twenty-first Century University, in a national, European and global context. The intersection of the Humanities and the wider public sphere is a major issue, as are relationships between the academy and national and international cultural institutions. Topics for consideration include the question of what is ‘research’ in the Humanities, and how does it relate to teaching?; the inauguration of what has been called the ‘Two Humanities’: the old and new disciplines of the human sciences; the appropriation of psychoanalytic theory by Cultural Studies; what does/might Knowledge Transfer mean for the Humanities?; the relationship between human and material sciences; the Humanities and the Learned Professions; the Academy and the Public Intellectual; ‘The Idea of a University’; the Humanities and Medicine: contemporary contexts.