Department-Wide
Initiatives
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After a series of intensive discussions, the UCSB English Department
in the late 1990's decided that it could complement its existing
breadth and depth of scholarship—organized as in most departments
by historical periods or methodology—by committing to three
broad, collective arenas of intellectual activity. These
arenas bring out the department's strengths by providing a conceptual
and practical framework in which faculty and students with mutually
reinforcing interests can work with each other across the usual
boundaries of specialization (a pattern that the department is also
fostering through such recent innovations as the Transcriptions
Project and Early
Modern Center). The first of the department-wide initiatives
to be implemented, for example, is Public
Humanities, started by co-organizers from the Medieval and Romantics
fields.
The following is from the department's Self
Statement of 1999, which articulate the department's new directions:
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Three Areas of Research Concern
Activities within the following
arenas will help organize distinctive kinds of collective
intellectual activities. Specific activities may span research
and teaching and may also help us to think about possible
relations to the public at large. We describe the arenas as
follows:
- Historicity and Historical
Studies
We understand this to include the theory of historical studies
as well as various historical practices. This area is of
particular concern at a moment when various forms of "presentism"
threaten to obliterate historical memory.
- Contemporary Theory and Culture
We understand this to include issues related to both material
and literary culture and such matters as the study of theoretical
issues related to gender and minority discourses of various
kinds. We also understand this to encourage research groups
concerned with various aspects of symbolic culture within
both local and global contexts.
- The
Public Humanities
Particular topics in this arena would focus on the place
of the humanities in the public sphere both now and in the
future and might include the intersection of literary studies
with such other disciplinary areas as cognitive science,
information science, and social science.
As these brief descriptions
indicate, we do not conceive these arenas as mutually exclusive.
For example, the study of the role of the humanities today naturally
also involves the consideration of the various roles that humanistic
studies have played in the past and plainly involves issues
of theory and culture as well. Rather, these are a triad of
mutually complementary arenas that define important concerns
at this moment in history and that can be used to help focus
many of our collective interests. |
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