2024-2025: How (And Why) Do We Represent Nature?
This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political meaning and its aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, advertising campaigns. This question asks how environments—and often their relations to human concerns—are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments. It invites us to self-reflexively ask how humanistic practices—especially artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical ones—have been sites of resource use and accumulation, and how experimental texts and events across many media and embodied performances might disrupt and re-envision those ecological entanglements? The question invites us to look at “nature” again, go over its history as a concept and field of aesthetic and philosophical knowledge, to learn, perhaps, how to see and feel it differently in a moment of unfolding climate catastrophe.
How (and Why) Do We Represent Nature? Courses & Events
2023-2024: What Forms the Self?
Anticipating big things on the horizon, in 2023-24, the humanities theme is a question: a question we think gets asked all across UR’s curriculum, a question that is at the very core of what liberal arts education broadly, and the humanities specifically, mean in today’s world. The question is, at least, double. In one version, it explores the hypothesis that different forms of selfhood (or personhood, citizenship, subjectivity) exist and have existed in different historical moments and geopolitical contexts. In the other, we turn our attention to how our selves come into being: what shapes us? What sustains us? What might change us?
What Forms the Self? Courses & Events
2022-2023: Power & Enchantment
This year, Humanities at UR is exploring the theme of Power and Enchantment. While the story of modernity is often told as a triumph of secular, universal reason over “enchanted” worldviews, our theme focuses on how enchantment remains crucial in our world. The theme is meant to include projects such as: 1) studies of religion, magic, witchcraft, alchemy, and so on as historical, cultural, and political phenomena; 2) investigations into the ways contemporary scientific and cultural thought reignites questions about the “aliveness” of the world and the “agency” of nonhuman entities and systems; 3) studies of how people become enchanted by power and those perceived to be powerful; and 4) remembering that “enchantment” is etymologically related to singing, explorations of how aesthetic or artistic texts and experiences shape our sense of worlds, including by generating feelings like wonder and awe.
Power & Enchantment Events
2021-2022: Repair & Recovery
Our humanities theme for the 2021-2022 academic year is Repair and Recovery, a focus that includes questions about what it means to recover from the pandemic (and other disasters), questions about repairing historical and ongoing injury, and questions about how scholarship attends to lost, forgotten, or neglected texts and histories. These events — all free and open to the public — offer us the opportunity to gather in the newly opened Humanities Commons spaces in order to consider how humanistic practices of thinking and interpretation are vital to how we imagine and enact different futures.