The latest volume in IASH's Occasional Papers series has been published today. Humanities of the Future: Perspectives from the Past and Present marks IASH's fiftieth-year anniversary at the University of Edinburgh. The book looks back and forward by half a century to understand how the conception and practice of humanities research is developing. IASH was founded in 1970 to encourage interdisciplinary research across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and to establish partnerships with other institutes and scholars around the world. The papers in our new volume reflect this interdisciplinarity and global outlook. They also highlight IASH’s more recent encouragement of work in the digital and environmental humanities, and research that centres diverse perspectives.
The papers were due to be delivered at our anniversary symposium in April 2020, sadly cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, many speakers asked if it was possible to contribute in a different way to mark the occasion. From this very wide-ranging set of chapters, we can see that the symposium's cancellation nonetheless inspired novel conversations about the trajectory of the humanities and has encouraged ideas and directions for the next 50 years to prepare IASH and the scholarly community for key trends in humanities futures. Humanities of the Future was edited by Dr Ben Fletcher-Watson and Jana Phillips. Contributions include:
Foreword by Prof. Peter Mathieson, Principal of the University
Introduction: Shifting Perspectives and the Humanities of the Future by Prof. Steve Yearley
Posthuman Knowledge: The Transversal Humanities in the 21st Century by Prof. Rosi Braidotti
New Aesthetics in Artificial Intelligence Art by Dr Colin Johnson
Autism, Neurodiversity and the Humanities by Dr Catherine Crompton
The Digital Archive as Space and Place in the Constitution, Production and Circulation of Knowledge by Dr Kathryn Simpson
Global Sound Archive: Soundmaps Projects and the Perspective of Future by Dr Noémie Fargier
Steil’s Tavern and the Musick Club: Recreating the Historical Memory of Edinburgh by Dr Elizabeth Ford
The Future of History and its Recent Past: In Praise of Boredom by Prof. Samuel Cohn
An Unlikely Research Partnership between a Medievalist and a Geneticist: Working Across Disciplines by Dr Natalie Goodison and Prof. Deborah Mackay
DNA and History by Prof. Soraya de Chadarevian
Holocaust Studies in the Era of Climate Change by Dr Tomasz Łysak
Setting Rumi: Casting The Intangible by Dr Margaret McAllister
You can download the accessible PDF version here. If you would like the ePub version suitable for e-readers, or a free copy of the book, please contact us at iash@ed.ac.uk or +44 (0) 131 650 4671.
The citation for the volume is: Fletcher-Watson, B. & Phillips, J., eds., 2020. Humanities of the Future: Perspectives from the Past and Present. Volume 21. Edinburgh: IASH Occasional Papers. ISBN: 9780953271313.