global humanities essay

Essay: Beyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

Javier Mendoza (photographer), “Standing Up for Their Rights,” 1986, ­Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

Over the past several years, scholars and critics have begun to talk about the survival of the humanities rather than its crisis. This essay traces the emergence of a rhetoric of salvation and survival in academic advocacy literature, evident in the genres, arguments, and metaphors that writers use to describe the academic humanities. Focusing, first, on a set of recent books that advocate for the humanities as a resource for deliberation, community formation, and critique, the essay then turns to the origin of the contemporary humanities in European philology as a background for the dualism of survival and crisis in narratives about the humanities. The essay concludes by arguing that we need a new framework for understanding the survival of the humanities as global humanities, in particular, one that does not emerge from  a European and Christological sense of survival. Drawing upon research conducted as part of the “ World Humanities Report ,” the essay identifies some of these alternative frameworks based upon the humanities in China, South Africa, and Argentina.

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Comparative Global Humanities Now

This essay proposes to energize the mission of the humanities by radically globalizing their subject matter and methods, taking inspiration from the world’s monumental archive of humanistic creativity over 5000 years of recorded experience. It advocates for Comparative Global Humanities as a crucial complement to the more presentist new humanities fields of medical, environmental, or public humanities. Comparative Global Humanities aims to be inclusively global in terms of subject matter and participants, conceptually comparative, and based on rigorous historical and philological research. A Global Humanities for the 21st century is no antiquarian endeavor, but a head-on response to the greatest challenges of our times: systemic racism, inequality, and fundamentalisms, which are rooted in the unresolved aftermath of wars, colonization, and violence, and use classical heritage for nationalist propaganda. To create more equal societies in the present we need to create more equality for other pasts – and learn from all they offer.

• 1 Humanities Crisis Transformations

The debate about the place of the humanities in the university is almost as old as the modern university itself. Constantly reinvigorated in times of economic uncertainty, the debate has taken on sharper contours with the recent prioritizing of STEM initiatives and relative decrease in student enrollments, faculty positions, and funding for humanistic disciplines.

In the new millennium voices of deep concern were prevalent until the mid-2010s, as evident in the report on the state of the humanities at Harvard (“Mapping the Future,” 2013) or the report on the humanities and social sciences from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (“The Heart of the Matter,” 2013). But over the past few years scholars have increasingly suggested that “The Crisis” has merely been an artefact of warped statistics that fails to take into account a variety of developments over the past half century. 1 The economic landfall of the COVID -19 crisis of 2020 and its predictable drastic austerity measures will doubtlessly bring real-world economic woes again front and center in the humanities crisis debate. But rather than paralyzing us, the foreboding of dire institutional shrinkage ahead should prompt us all the more urgently to ask what kind of humanities we want and need now . Although often perceived as part of the same conversation, debates about the humanities have come in quite different shapes: as data-driven diagnostics, moral apologetics, hands-on administrative advisory, or visionary manifestoes. They all have value, but it is good to keep their divergent framing, and audience in mind.

One of the most enlightening recent interventions comes from the economist Dennis Ahlburg, who in The Changing Face of Higher Education: Is There an International Crisis in the Humanities? surveys the “humanities crisis debate” with the astonished anthropological gaze of the outsider. He finds it far too moralistic, and lacking in data (despite projects like the “Humanities Indicators”). His volume expands the often restrictive national debates into a global conversation. He thus includes a dozen case studies on the state of the humanities in countries ranging from Australia and South Africa, to Israel, Egypt and Japan. To devise this as a balanced experiment with comparable outcomes, Ahlburg asked each contributor to respond to the same set of questions. Australia or Mexico face apparently no crisis, while in Egypt humanities enrollment have substantially increased, due to the overall rise of university enrollments, and the feminization of the student population (Assaad and Abdalla 2019). But even behind a “no crisis” diagnosis or rising enrollments great challenges may lurk, especially in poorer countries with young and underfunded education systems: in Brazil the main purpose of a humanities college education is the professional training of teachers for primary and secondary schools, with hardly any research mission (Campello and Prandini Assis). 2

How can we assess the current global landscape of the humanities? Though only a limited perspective, we can gather intriguing answers from the “Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.” Leafing through the webpages of the 250+ participating centers around the world, a few intriguing conclusions emerge. First, and least surprisingly, the bulk of humanities centers are located in North America or Europe, with only few such institutions in the Middle East or Africa. Affluence and educational opportunity are directly correlated with the presence of a higher education system that can afford to create humanities centers. This network gives scholars in the US and Europe the chance – and duty – to reach out to institutions and colleagues beyond the West struggling to build up basic institutions for humanities education. Second, from the webpages we can get quite a clear picture of new humanities fields that have emerged over the past decade, in particular the medical, environmental, public/applied, and digital humanities. Despite their different focus and subject matter, they have one commonality: the immediacy of literal, obvious relevancy and urgency, which the raging of the COVID -19 pandemic, of wildfires in California or Australia, and the dramatic data-expansion of our daily lives drive home by the day. We have clearly gone from a rhetoric of “crisis” (as embodied still in Bérube and Nelson of 1995) to the recent rhetoric of transformation and opportunity (Most, Ahlburg, Sörlin).

The shift in rhetoric and the public promotion of a handful of “new” humanities fields mark a new era for the humanities. Yet, a problematic commonality of these fields is that they focus on contemporary issues or a contemporary lens on particular topics. Where are new paradigms for the core humanities disciplines that work historically and philologically? This relates to a second concern, namely the blurred line between knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. There is no question that the humanities are theoretically uniquely well positioned “to build new national narratives, revive family life, restore community bonds, and shared moral culture,” in the worlds of David Brooks in the International New York Times a few years ago (Brooks 19). They can do so in a sort of “influencer” role, where humanists use their knowledge and persuasive power to facilitate debates about social problems and help craft consensus over potential solutions. But, as academic fields, the humanities are first and foremost a form of knowledge production and our most urgent task is to ensure they can actually, in this era of retrenchment, reproduce themselves with a critical mass of competent scholars in order to produce new knowledge. If we place knowledge dissemination over knowledge production, we shortcut the real mission and power of humanistic inquiry.

The fierce debate about the actual “value” of the humanities has pushed humanists onto the defensive and the humanities into ancillary roles: literature departments often feel underappreciated as “service” units teaching languages to physicists or engineers – as future global actors. Also, the standard rhetoric of the humanities’ power to hone students’ “critical and analytical abilities,” “eloquent writing,” or “communicative fluency” captures part of the importance of the humanities for fostering democratic values and civil societies. But we should not limit them to their toolbox. Nor are they reducible to our advocacy for literally urgent topics such as climate change or pandemics, although it helps us cope with our very legitimate existential Angst about the imminent future of humanity and our planet. Only the combination of these ancillary public roles with the production of new knowledge can give the humanities sustainable relevance and the sovereignty needed to put it to use for the greater good. Therefore, arguments for the value of the humanities that emphasize their specific ways of producing new knowledge seem to me most promising: take for example Rens Bod’s demonstrations of the practical contributions of humanistic studies in A New History of the Humanities. The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (2013); or Rita Felski’s reminder of how the humanities “curate,” “convey,” and “compose” culture, which highlights the creative processes of knowledge transmission and production (2016).

This leaves us with the elemental questions: how can we ask the right questions that produce bold new knowledge in the humanities today? What kind of new methodologies will emerge from this? And how can we relate historical research to urgent questions of our moment? In this essay I propose to energize the mission of the humanities by radically expanding and deepening their subject matter and methods, taking inspiration from the world’s monumental archive of humanistic creativity over 5000 years of recorded experience. I advocate for Comparative Global Humanities as a crucial complement to the presentism of the new fields of medical, environmental, or public humanities. Comparative Global Humanities aims to be inclusively global in terms of subject matter and participants, conceptually comparative, and based on rigorous historical and philological research. I articulate this vision from the local angle of my personal experience as a scholar of classical East Asian literatures born and raised in Germany and now employed in the US . I study premodern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literatures, which puts me at a quite particular angle towards the bulk of humanities research in the West focused on Europe and its global colonial and postcolonial footprint. East Asia is not just home to some of the world’s oldest continuous textual cultures, harking back more than three millennia in the case of China, its central “reference culture,” but today also home to several of the most powerful world economies, and a global export hub of highly successful pop music and media culture. As one of the world’s only areas never pervasively colonized by Europeans, but that had its own modern, Western-style colonizer – Japan – East Asian countries have managed to adapt their own cultural traditions and build globally competitive education systems more than any other part of the non-Western world. Scholars in this region are thus economically, culturally, and institutionally in a unique position to “talk back” to the West and assert their own place in humanistic research. This will undoubtedly further increase with the remarkably more successful handling of the COVID -19 pandemic by South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, and Japan. With their success in drastically reducing loss of life while also keeping the economy and national education running – all in sharp contrast to the US  – East Asian states are the global winners of the pandemic crisis, not the least in terms of moral capital. While the methods of containment might be controversial in some cases, the governments’ ability to prevent massive loss of life undeniably carries moral weight, on top of the political and economic gains. Thinking not just about East Asia, as one macroregion of the world, but through East Asia, will thus become increasingly common on a global stage – including all the challenges of the new Sinocentrism. Even critics of the “Asian Century” euphoria, like Michael Auslin in The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region , see this transformative power in the region. In this emerging new world order, we need to take seriously the different historical experience and cultural orientations that have made the East Asian states what they are today. Their “successful” modernization and economic power, which dominate the news, is only a small part of the story that needs to be told about this macro-region with globally still quite untapped stores of historical experience and cultural repertoires. Thus my personal experience as a scholar of East Asia represents not just the voice of a peripheral area specialist, but can serve as a minuscule seismograph of emerging landslide changes in global consciousness.

• 2 How to Go Global? The Promise and Limits of Globalizing Disciplines

For the world-minded person there is currently no shortage of paradigms with global ambitions: “world history” and “global history,” “world literature,” and “comparative philosophy” or “global philosophy,” to name just a few. Despite their considerable differences in age and pedigree, degree of institutionalization, and current impact, they all share at least three characteristics: the ambition to go global, a basic commitment to existing disciplinarity, and the relative lack of interest in substantially engaging with other global “world” paradigms developing in disciplines next door. How “global” are our “global” paradigms today? And how do their paths of getting there compare?

Let’s indulge for a moment in a broad-brushed contrastive sketch. “World History” is arguably the venerable ancestor of global paradigms. Ultimately rooted in the “universal” histories of Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, it has gained considerable institutional infrastructure since the 1980s, with programs, journals and professional associations. Its age and pedigree and the often big-sweep gestures of imperial ambition evident in popular books on “world history” keep suspicions of eurocentrism alive. The most protean new trend in historical studies is “Global History,” which started its meteoric rise around the turn of the millennium. 3 Unlike World History, it is less a subdiscipline of history than a particular way of doing history, a welcome symptom of the globalization of the discipline of history as a whole. As C.A. Bayly noted (using the older concept of “world history” to also capture the new trend of “global history”): “All historians are world historians now, though many have not yet realized it.” (Bayly 2004, 469) The discipline of history has been particularly productive in spawning recent globalizing approaches – histoire croisée or entangled history, maritime history, global histories of empire etc. They often share an attractive tension between the local and the global. Unlike the sweeping gestures of popular world history, popular global history publications typically zoom in on palpable and traceable objects and dwell on microhistorical manifestations of global processes. Consider the delicious volumes the publisher Reaktion Books has been churning out in past years such as Sugar: A Global History , or Barbecue: A Global History !

Various forms of global history are poised to change the face of the discipline of history tout court . Particularly promising are approaches like Dominic Sachsenmaier’s (2011), who shows how little really “global” “global history” actually is today. Demonstrating substantial differences of this field in the US , Germany, and China he reminds us of the blatant inequalities in the global study of history and the responsibility of Western scholars to make sure that we develop a truly global “Global History” field, where not just Western scholars have the privilege of authoring new theoretical paradigms.

Consider, in contrast, the discipline of philosophy. On May 11 of 2016 Bryan van Norden, a scholar of Chinese philosophy, and his colleague Jay Garfield published an opinion piece in “The Stone” column of The New York Times that gave philosophy colleagues an ultimatum: “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is.” Both argued with bitter stridency for opening philosophy departments to non-Western thought traditions. Within a single day the column received 800 comments, many filled with vitriolic hostility. One reader commented that Confucius “might have had some good philosophical ideas, [but] China never produced a tradition of argument and commentary following his work, and so there was no real philosophical tradition in China.” (van Norden, XIII ). This inspired van Norden to fight back with even greater vehemence in Taking Back Philosophy. A Multicultural Manifesto (2017). To say that the globalizing of philosophy has suddenly become a “hot topic” is a drastic understatement. I am not aware of any comparably ugly and violent debate around the topic of the globalization of disciplines in any other humanities discipline. Compare, for civility, Richard Drayton and David Motadel’s “The Futures of Global History” (2018), a thoughtful response to critics of global history and spirited argument for its value. Given that only very few philosophy departments in the US have been hiring scholars working on philosophical traditions beyond the West, philosophy is currently unquestionably the discipline that is most resistant to diversifying its intellectual scope, faculty, and curriculum.

Next to global history, “World Literature” has institutionalized itself most rapidly over the past decade as a global paradigm. 4 Though bearing an old association with Goethe and 19th-century forms of European cosmopolitanism, it has experienced a rapid new-world incarnation over the past decade, particularly in the US , in the form of new “world literature” departments, David Damrosch’s remarkable Harvard-based Institute for World Literature ( IWL ), a new flagship journal ( Journal of World Literature ), and also three multi-volume world literature anthologies (Norton, Longman, Bedford) used by tens of thousands of students every year in newly invigorated liberal arts curricula.

The World Literature paradigm has had a formidable career, both in terms of its resounding success and the vivid debates sparked by its critics, such as Emily Apter in her Against World Literature . Its most prominent guiding spirit, David Damrosch, is a model of worldliness. He sparked decisive debates with his pioneering What is World Literature? (2003) through sparkling analyses of subjects ranging from Gilgamesh, medieval German female mystics, to Egyptian and Aztec poetry. But the majority of scholarship and theorizing of “world literature” today focuses on the modern and contemporary periods with a few exceptions, most notably Alexander Beecroft’s An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (2015). The temporal flattening of world literature debates towards the modern and contemporary limits the paradigm’s scope, both thematically and methodologically. We miss out on what classical Indian epic, East Asian court poetry, or Roman novels can bring to the study of “world literature.” More worrisomely, the focus on the modern and contemporary periods risks limiting research topics largely to stories of reception, and predominantly to colonial and postcolonial contexts. Yet, if world literature in modernity is easy because cultures are connected, how do we deal with the disconnected cultures preceding modernity? That is, how do we learn to compare them? The study of world literature, understood in planetary longue durée as Damrosch conceived and modeled it, requires us to more explicitly engage with the millennia-crossing bulk of the world’s textual cultures before the short span of a century or so that most world literature studies focus on.

Here a new paradigm-in-the-making could productively complement both global history, with its focus on interconnections and reception phenomena, and world literature studies, with its strong orientation towards the modern: let’s call it for now, in bland descriptive terms, “comparative global (premodern) humanities.” Philologists in particular of the various ancient and medieval worlds have pushed for comparisons of the distinctive cultural traditions that preceded the pervasive impact of Western colonization. Labels vary: “Boston University Comparative Studies of the Premodern World Initiative,” “Global Medieval Studies Program” (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana), “Archaia (Yale Initiative for the Study of Antiquity and the Premodern World),” “Premodern World Initiative” (University of Minnesota) or “Global Premodernities Project” (University of Washington), to name a few recent initiatives. Though still without a unified label, “premodernists” – of East and South Asia, the Near East and Africa, Europe, the Pre-Columbian Americas – recognize a shared mission. There is currently a palpable excitement about suddenly discovering so many overlapping intellectual passions and pedagogical interests. This sense of community gives common purpose, as premodern fields in all disciplines are hardest hit by the humanities crisis.

Comparative Global (Premodern) Humanities? What flesh can we put to this bony string of abstractions?

“ Comparative ”: this emerging movement vitally depends on developing a richer array of methodologies of comparatism, because it targets cultures before the pervasive impact of European colonization and the large-scale “globalization” process this initiated.

Still, its geographic reach aims for a “ Global ,” meaning here “globe-spanning,” world scale (in a geographical sense of including the entire planet, rather than the temporal sense of targeting the trajectory of increasingly “global(izing)” cultures over the past centuries).

“ Premodern ” is in parenthesis: until ten years ago this term was a preferred way of scholars of non-Western cultures to point to the period of native development preceding Westernization. Some of my Europeanist friends sneered at it as a fuzzy, unproductive concept. It is indeed a fuzzy temporal marker: even for cultures within the same macroregion its date range can greatly vary. Functionally, Chinese “modernity,” as defined by the spread of print culture, emergence of commercial culture and social classes of its consumers, and historical self-consciousness towards earlier periods, can be dated back to the Song Dynasty (960–1279), whereas, with variations, the “early modern” begins in Korea arguably in the fifteenth and in Japan in the seventeenth century. Thanks to this functional definition scholars now talk comfortably about “early modern East Asia,” as an implicit comparandum to “early modern Europe.” But in terms of the defining force of native traditions and their grip on society, East Asia’s “premodernity” reaches into the 20th century, and its end is associated with the demise of the Chinese tribute system, the death of Literary Chinese as the region’s lingua franca , and the waning and contestation of traditional forms of writing, governing, believing, and living. But even more problematically, “premodern” is too subservient to the master narrative of modernity and its strawman “tradition” or “native convention.” For a movement that aims to bring the full span of the world’s past 5000 millennia of recorded historical experience bear on our present and future, it is seriously limiting in its subordination to the concept of “modernity.”

“ Humanities ”: we have yet to fully appreciate the fact that the currently most successful “global” paradigms are all associated with extant humanities disciplines. World Literature, World History and Global History, Comparative Philosophy, to name a few, are all cued to strongly disciplinary environments and their different conceptual and methodological repertoires. Thus, the “globalization” of the humanities proceeds in surprisingly parochial fashion. This has many advantages. Disciplinary global paradigms, however self-critical, do not fundamentally question the boundaries of our 19th century, outmoded divisions into “literature,” “philosophy,” “history,” or “religion.” They already have their pre-existing institutional stages, academic audience, and a full disciplinary apparatus of associations, journals, and job search venues ready to accept new ideas pitched along these extant structures. This promises quicker success, in contrast to Comparative Global Humanities initiatives which will have to struggle through differences in disciplinary best practices, terminology, and methodology.

This is a monumental challenge, because a postcolonial literary theorist, a philologically-minded historian, or an ecumenical world religion scholar might share little conceptual vocabulary and few methodological assumptions. Yet, this “disadvantage” of disciplinary breaks and interdisciplinary gaps carries enormous intellectual potential, for much more ground-breaking innovation than any of the disciplinary global paradigms can ever achieve alone. Comparative Global Humanities, or whatever we want to call it, will need to go a longer way and build more bridges in the process, through potentially quite recalcitrant dialogues, but to potentially much greater intellectual effect. It could become a major vector in the global transformation of the humanities thanks to – and not despite! – its area-studies virtues: scholars with deep philological and cultural area expertise and a naturally engrained transdisciplinarity – connecting intuitively the study of phenomena that modern academia keeps distinct as “history,” “literature,” “philosophy,” “religious studies” or “art history.” Note here that “transdisciplinarity” is different from still discipline-focused, and often quite selective, “interdisciplinarity.” It is not without irony that area studies, a favorite target of post-war criticism seen as complicit with Cold War politics, could structurally enable a greater innovation potential.

3 “Comparative Global Humanities”

• 3.1 Globalize Classics!

Among the new initiatives projects on the “Ancient World” are strikingly prominent. The NYU -affiliated Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is to date probably the largest such enterprise. But numerous other initiatives have sprung up: Stanford University’s “Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project”; McGill’s and Northwestern University’s “Global Antiquities” initiatives; Chinese University of Hong Kong’s “Center for the Comparative Study of Antiquity”; or also summer schools like the “Globalizing Classics” summer course symposium at Humboldt University in 2015. Despite their reference to the “global” these initiatives tend to focus, narrowly, on comparisons of Greco-Roman (plus perhaps Near Eastern) antiquity and China, mapping onto the world’s current economic powerhouses and the political metageography of our historical moment. Also, some of these initiatives are limited to particular disciplines, such as archeology or institutional history. To my knowledge there is currently no initiative that we could actually call “global” and that aims to really be global by creating new comparative methodologies through a holistic transdisciplinary humanistic perspective.

I believe that this is what we need: a collaborative initiative that is inclusively global, conceptually comparative, and based on rigorous historical and philological research. Growing this out of a focus on Antiquity has its advantages. This is the period when formative cultural orientations and genealogies of cultural knowledge and practices developed that enable particularly productive cross-cultural comparisons. Second, “Classics” as a Western field of study, is, proverbially, “the oldest area studies field,” with a strongly transdisciplinary perspective. Also, today, antiquity is the period that is most often instrumentalized politically for populist collective identity formation and nation branding, which imposes an ethical imperative on “classicists” around the world to speak out against such abuses, wherever this happens, in India, China, Israel or Hungary.

We have a long way to go. Although any culture of longer historical standing has its own share of “classical periods” or “classical texts,” “classicists” are not created equal. The unqualified label “Classics” still only applies to the Western European Greco-Roman heritage and its study. At least four types of glass ceilings hinder the globalization of “Classics.”

Our reluctance to let go of the cultural capital that comes with the universalization of the Greco-Roman tradition as “Classics” par excellence, and, in Europe or North America, the natural local attachment to that tradition as “ours,” despite increasing demographic diversity.

The international authority that western Classicists enjoy in contrast to the often more locally limited agency of classicists in non-Western countries.

Relatedly, the ideological, often nationalist, pressures to which classicists outside of the West are subjected in their native countries; or the discrimination, sometimes even violent threats, directed at Westerners who study the history of cultures beyond Europe, which non-Western populist, nationalistic countries claim today as their own alone.

Intriguingly, the marginalization of the postclassical Latin, and the Eastern Greek/Byzantine classical, heritage within Western “Classics.”

Nobody would want to deny that classical periods, values, canons, and classical studies existed outside of Europe. But Western Classics scholars have faced a formidable challenge in seeing their field drastically shrink over the past century from a royal discipline embodying the universal foundations of general education and moral edification, to a waning field among many devoted to the study of one particular – even if still particularly hegemonic – region. Addressing this cognitive quantum leap from universality to problematically universalized particularity requires much time, shared intellectual effort, and mutual thoughtfulness.

In the meantime, scholars of their native classical traditions beyond the West have not just lacked international status as “classicists” but often face ideological pressures at home. Take the case of East Asia, where since the turn of the twentieth century the rise of nationalisms and “national studies” (國學; in particular in the patriotic fields of literature and history) have made scholars of classical traditions and archeologists into important players in the creation of collective identity and global nation branding. Typically, they do not have an international status as the interpreters of the world’s foundational civilizations. And scholars of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese classical traditions working in their native countries are inevitably agents constrained by the limits of “national studies.”

Consider this: a Chinese scholar of Chinese classical literature sits at the heart of the national paradigm and can speak on a national stage; but a Japanese scholar of Japanese literature written in Literary Chinese, Japan’s dominant language of government, elite education, Buddhism, and belles lettres from the eighth through the twentieth centuries, is marginalized in “national literature studies,” which centers around a vernacular Japanese canon created around the turn of the twentieth century in the midst of Japanese empire-building – symbolized by the grand vernacular novel The Tale of Genji , written by the eleventh-century court lady Murasaki Shikibu. The deep nationalism of classical studies in the East Asian countries stands in stark contrast to the largely “transnational” discipline of (Western) “Classics” since Hellenistic times, or at least the Renaissance. True, we see different schools and academic styles in Germany, Italy, or Greece, and more differences even within these national traditions. Still, no one nation can claim “Classics” as their national monopoly. In the PRC , research on Chinese culture by foreigners and scholars working outside of China is lumped together as “Overseas Chinese Studies” ( haiwai hanxue 海外漢學), as distinct from Chinese national studies. Needless to say, there is no such thing as “Overseas Greek Studies,” today’s Hellenic Republic is not the center for the study of Ancient Greece, nor do scholars around the world have to publish in modern Greek to be heard and respected. Yet, research on the classical literatures of China, Japan, or Korea happens overwhelmingly in their respective national languages and national literature departments and research of premodern East Asia in the region is severely hampered by debilitating language barriers, as the more senior generation of scholars have typically very little knowledge of other East Asian languages or the new lingua franca that is gradually replacingthe now dead Literary Chinese: Global English.

But even Western classicists are not created equal. Renaissance and Baroque writers applied Hesiod’s and Ovid’s decline model of four ages of the world – golden, silver, bronze, iron – to the history of literature (Ax). Until recently studying “silver-age,” post-Augustan Latinity, was considered second best at best. By now Late Antiquity has been enthusiastically rediscovered, as a new golden age of sorts blending excitingly into the Medieval. But it seems unlikely that Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin Studies will ever play a central role in either Classics or national literature departments. Ernst Robert Curtius’s grand dream of understanding European literatures through their shared Latin roots is unlikely to be realized unless European national literature departments hire more faculty with serviceable Latin skills, relevant cultural historical knowledge, and a fresh, cosmopolitan and de-nationalized mindset. As an offspring of the Latin West the field of Classics has had little incentive to grant Byzantine studies a proper place in the master narrative of Western civilization. The cliché of a gulf between Europe’s West and East has been further enhanced by centuries of Ottoman rule over Greece, negative images of the “Balkans” as a region of irrational ethnic strife, orthodox Christianity, the iron curtain, and its aftermath in post-socialist Southeastern Europe, plus Greece’s image of an economic problem child in the European Union.

How can we reshape the grossly uneven landscape of “classical studies,” here just briefly sketched for the East Asia and the West? A landscape deformed by inequality, neocolonial and nationalist ideologies, political pressures, and, often unconsciously, culturalist pride? I believe we need to both globalize “Classics” and localize it. “Classics” has to become “classical studies” of the world’s civilizations, not just of Greco-Roman antiquity. This will allow our concepts of the classical – its canons, values, periods, people, works, uses in the present – to drastically diversify. Opening the door to transforming “Classics” into globalized “classical studies” is a comparatively easy act for Western academics: it only requires some generosity and curiosity. But scholars working in regions that tap native traditions to fuel nationalism or religious extremism, such as in parts of Asia and the Middle East, are likely to be severely limited in their freedom to “globalize” classics, torn between the historical record and their academic integrity, and threatened by ideological demands and political repression. This shows the urgent need to also “localize” classical studies: “localizing” classical studies requires us to understand the specific pressures and actual dangers classical scholars face in particular regions of the world.

Ironically, the de-politicization of Western “Classics” has contributed to its waning importance in the 20th century. If it weren’t for the tragic effects of ideological pressures and fears of political repression, Western classicists might even envy the degree of center-stage “relevancy” of classical studies in the daily life and politics of nationalist states with resolute nativist interest groups. Think of India’s successful attempt to have June 21 declared International Yoga Day by the UN (where is Roman wrestling on the UN agenda?). “Localizing classics” for Western Classicists of the Greco-Roman world means to re-understand classical studies as a deeply political responsibility. We need to be awake to the living uses and abuses of classical traditions and studies around the world and generous and astute in supporting colleagues facing those challenges.

• 3.2 Dare to Compare!

“My befuddlement with comparison is primarily methodological and epistemological in nature. But I’m also befuddled by its stunted presence in our disciplinary discourses – the first of several conundrums I want to share here. […] the disquiet with comparison seems to be ubiquitous – it’s the crazy uncle in the attic you try not to talk about” (Pollock “Conundrums of Comparison” 273–274). Sheldon Pollock diagnoses a rampant “comparative deficit” and reflects on the challenges and benefits of pushing for new methodologies of comparison. In an earlier article he contrasts the systematic development of comparative methodology in the social sciences into a subdiscipline with an “unconcern with the theory of comparativism” in the humanities, in particular in comparative intellectual history and comparative literature (Pollock “Comparison Without Hegemony” 186 f.). Disciplinary discussions of comparison have a long genealogy, emerging in more systematic form in the nineteenth century with new disciplines such as Comparative Linguistics and Comparative Literature. The classicist Walter Scheidel is equally stunned by “comparative deficit” in historical studies: “In the study of History, comparative analysis remains rare. Explicit reflection on the uses, methodology and problems of historical comparison is rarer still. In this respect, the divide between History as an academic discipline that has at least occasionally been counted among the Social Sciences and fields such as Economics, Political Science and Sociology is as wide as it can be.” (Scheidel 40). With long-standing debates on cultural comparison originating with Johann Gottfried Herder, Madame de Staël, or the Transylvanian scholar Hugó Meltzl of Lomnitz, a founding figure of Comparative Literature in the 1870s; with the recent notable increase of edited volumes juxtaposing case studies drawn from different parts of the world on anything from court culture, foreign encounters, and travelogues to “world philology,” history of the book, or history of science; and with comparative data analysis being daily business in the social sciences – why do especially scholars of premodern cultures diagnose a “comparative deficit”? Even despite prominent recent publications explicitly devoted to comparison, such as a special issue on comparison in New Literary History (2009, no. 40.3) or Rita Felski’s and Susan S. Friedman’s influential Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013)?

One reason is the conceptual fuzziness of “comparison.” It is actually a complex of various, at times only vaguely related, practices rather than a concept , and it treacherously glosses over a variety of widely divergent approaches under the same umbrella term.

As a basic cognitive faculty that triggers the forming of judgements based on the juxtaposition of at least two things, the breathtaking semantic breadth of “comparison” reaches from the myriad “comparative” activities that guide our daily lives, such as comparison of prices for goods and services, of neighbors, or of siblings, to academic forms of “comparisons,” based on, typically, statistics for the quantitative social sciences or qualitative comparanda for the interpretive humanities. “Comparisons” can be vertical – juxtaposing phenomena from the same tradition, for example comparing the readership of novels in eighteenth- with those of twentieth-century England; or it can be horizontal, in, very roughly, two ways: first, comparing for example twenty-first-century British novels with anglophone novels by various postcolonial writers in Africa or Asia. Or comparing archaic Greek poetry with the ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (ca. 600  BCE ). These two horizontal types of comparisons are actually radically different forms of “comparison” that require a different methodological repertoire. Of the first type are comparisons with shared historical genealogies that are thus a form of reception studies or studies of transcultural exchanges, as we now prefer to say to more equitably highlight mutual engagement in the process. The overwhelming majority of comparative studies in the humanities practices actually this form of “comparison,” within traditions or across traditions related in time and space. Our own visceral experience of globalization and mindset of glocal connectedness, via the internet, fair trade products or local organic food, makes us revel in maritime networks, trade routes, and in processes of diaspora, translation, and transculturation. These are all current areas of vibrant interest creating empowering new insights and, in the case of research on premodern periods, uncovering patterns of global interconnectedness before our own “Global Age” proper. We naturally pay attention to stories of cultural reception and transcultural interaction. “Global Studies,” the study of transnational phenomena in particular from an economic, political, sociological, and institutional perspective, has been the trendsetter in research about globalization, but it is no coincidence, that otherwise comparison-critical historians spearheaded “Global History” parallel to the rise of Global Studies. This tacit kinship between Global Studies and Global History is plainly visible in recent reference works like The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (2019), which admits only one of the core humanities disciplines into their purview: History. Needless to say, the kinship between studies of globalization and Global History risks to anachronistically project connectivity optimism onto earlier periods in history.

But in their diagnosis of a comparative deficit Pollock and Scheidel are not talking about either the vertical or the first – genealogical – horizontal type of comparatism. They point here to methodologies of comparison of the second horizontal type: the comparative juxtaposition of cultural production in historically unrelated cultures. It is precisely the lack of connectivity that requires a different comparatist tool set – although it is, ironically, twenty-first-century globalization that enables us to research the previous lack of connection between cultures.

• 3.3 What Travels, and What Doesn’t, and Why? The Trouble with the Non-Genealogical

We can restrain our connectivity optimism and construe globalization as a gradual, yet relentlessly inevitable densening of connective networks over the past centuries or millennia, or even show the downsides of connectivity, blatantly visible with the COVID  19 pandemic (Gänger & Osterhammel). But it is terribly difficult to unthink globalization and “switch off” this most subcutaneous catalyst of our quotidian experience and mindset. “Reception” or “transculturation” has become our cognitive default. It is hard to imagine that things might not travel. But different things have always travelled in different ways, and overall, much less so before the nineteenth century. Take “silk” versus “canonical poetry.” Silk travelled from China across Eurasia to places of voracious demand. The Roman Senate issued several edicts banning Chinese silk (or, as Tacitus relates, in 14  CE the wearing of silk clothing by males) to avoid trade imbalances. For men it was considered effeminate and “oriental”; and it was shunned as being too transparent and sensual on the pious bodies of Roman women. Silk traveled mostly through small local networks whose traders would move within the region (Hansen), but its high demand made it a “global item” already in antiquity.

But what about elite poetry, a comparably highly prized good? Take for example the China’s Classic of Poetry , or Virgil’s Aeneid . The first complete translations of the Classic of Poetry into Western languages date to the nineteenth century and the first complete Chinese translation of the Aeneid , first attempted in 1930, was only published in 1984 (Liu)! Despite its towering status in its respective cultures, canonical poetry often hardly travelled beyond the immediate cultural sphere, where it was canonized as part of the educational curriculum, in the case of Rome, the Hellenistic and Roman empires, and for China, the Sinographic Sphere of East Asia. We might attribute the difference in “connectivity” between China and Rome/Europe, by a few millennia, to the difference between travelling “objects” versus “texts.” But things can get far more complicated when we even just focus on texts. Prose tales and fiction, such as the Jātaka Tales about the Buddha, or epic romances about Alexander the Great spread widely across the Eurasian continent, passing through multiple languages and cultures; Buddha tales even inspired the many versions of Barlaam and Josaphat , a widely popular story of a pious prince that was adapted to different religious milieus as it reached the Middle East and Europe. Protagonists, plot elements, and didactic purpose took new shapes on their way across the continent. Silk, ritual vessels, religious statues or beliefs, ideologies, governance techniques, popular literature, court poetry, and lastly, books – as the material object can obviously travel independently of its content – all travelled at different speed and on different grounds and conditions.

So here is a false paradox: do we need to treat Buddhist popular tales, where plot is much more mobile than the precise diction and meter of elite poetry, along a “reception” vector, but canonical poetry along a “comparative vector”? That seems intuitively wrong. Is the disjunction between mobility and high status in the textual/genre hierarchy culturally specific? If so, what does that imply for cultural transfer in particular across script and cosmopolitan language boundaries? When and why is “pop culture” necessarily the more mobile traveler than elite traditions? Where, what, and how is the “transition” between genealogical and purely “connectionless” comparisons?

These are some of the exciting questions that deserve our attention and the development of new methodologies. The comparative deficit is all the more dire, because non-genealogical comparisons have a bad reputation for being either unproductive or hegemonic. An older variant, in East-West comparisons since the nineteenth century has been assumption of an “ellipsis” (Denecke 12–13) the juxtaposition of cultures that results in detecting what the other is “missing” (the scientific revolution? Epic poetry? Concepts of truth and metaphysics? Potatoes?). This is definitely “comparison with hegemony” (to echo Sheldon Pollock’s “Comparison Without Hegemony”), an ignominiously imperialistic version of comparatism. Kinder versions of this approach attempt to somehow identify X (Human rights? Philosophy? Technology?) in all cultures to ensure that all people on earth have equal right to produce such cultural capital from their own histories. As much as we can morally appreciate the Samaritan impulse in these ecumenical versions of comparatism, it creates no transformative new knowledge, especially because the very definitions of “Philosophy” or “Human Rights” are defined by universalizing Western concepts. Even worse, the Samaritan approach erases radical cultural differences that would need critical comparative, historical assessment if we want comparatism to produce historical and cultural knowledge rather than serve as a tool for global redemption and peace-making. “Everybody had it (or, tragically and regrettably not)” is nothing more than a slogan of comparative branding and mending of nations and their histories. We need comparisons that enable transformative insights about both sides of the comparison.

Short-cutting the search for new comparative methodologies by retreating into methodologically less challenging studies of transcultural interaction would conceptually impoverish the new global humanities. True, the focus on transregional networks has increasingly brought to light the local agency of “peripheries,” that we should now not consider “peripheral” anymore. This is revisionary, valuable and has a powerful ethical imperative. But studying “reception” will always play out on a conceptually Western ground – whether of “Westernization” or the resistance against it. Limiting ourselves to the cozier parameters of studying reception eliminates the shock of facing radical alterity and “incomparability.” This is understandable. Isn’t it less daunting to study reception than to take the risk to devise never-perfectly-fitting and always-open-to-criticism comparisons? To study genealogical connections we typically need fewer languages (one can comfortably do “postcolonial theory” and “world literature” with serviceable English or French skills only), less competence in totally different cultural traditions or life experiences far from home, and can drastically reduce the anxiety over taking the intellectual quantum leap, not to say leap of faith, that any non-genealogical, horizontal comparative work demands.

Comparisons of premodern worlds might seem temporally less adjacent to contemporary issues. But methodologically the comparative study of these worlds promise to fulfill urgent epistemological and ethical imperatives for the present and future: we learn how to empathize differently (beyond the potentially paralyzing model of, despite all nuancing, perpetrators and victims in postcolonial studies), and how to cope with true alterity, confronting intellectual, religious, social, literary worlds that pique and unsettle our conceptual habits, allowing us to thoroughly globalize our approaches instead of short-cutting them again and again through the colonial and post-colonial feedback loop of Western cultural parameters.

Comparison is rebellious and radical. It is ethically agnostic, or actually ambivalent, as it can be used as a tool for hegemonic control, but also as a grand, revisionary equalizer. We can tap its revisionary potential particularly through premodern worlds. This form of comparatism shares its ethical purpose with postcolonial studies, but accomplishes its goal through the lens of the pre-colonial. It opens our eyes to radically different cultural realities and truths that can help us to thoroughly “globalize” and thereby invigorate our current humanities disciplines.

3.4 Practice “ Conceptual Worlding” and Metageographical Critique!

Opening the canon and archive of “world literature” has been a great achievement of world literature pedagogy over the past couple of decades, as traceable in the three largest anglophone world literature anthologies for college classroom use: The Norton Anthology of World Literature, The Longman Anthology of World Literature , and The Bedford Anthology of World Literature . In its first incarnation of The Norton Anthology of World Literature – The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces of 1956 – the Western canon was still dominant. Since the 1990s in particular the canon of what counts as “world literature” has greatly expanded, from, for East Asia, China and Japan to, finally by 2012, smaller East literatures, such as Korean, and Vietnamese. 5 How can we balance the expansion of the globalizing canon from the world’s traditions with the desire to retain the strongest representation of beloved European classics? And how do we get from archival expansion – “more stuff” – to true conceptual cross-pollination and innovation – “new methods”?

Respecting and extending the right of all men and women to philosophy also supposes […] the appropriation but also the surpassing of languages that […] are called foundational or originary for philosophy, that is, the Greek, Latin, German, or Arabic languages. Philosophy should be practiced, according to paths that are not simply anamnesic, in languages that are without filiational relation with these roots. Derrida 12

Derrida advocates here – at least in theory, though unfortunately never in his own practice – for a form of globalizing philosophy, where other languages and thought traditions serve as source for new kinds of philosophizing. And I agree that thinking new, living new, and promoting more global equality among countries, cultures, and communities requires other languages and worlds than Global English and Euro-americanism (or “postcolonial immigrant multiculturalism”). But with the pervasive impact of the West, is there even any language left “without filiational relation” to the originary languages of Western philosophy? Is there any space left where we can transcend anamnesis ? How can we hope for conceptual innovation from languages that have long been without a genealogical relation to European languages and with their own strong thought traditions, but that have been thoroughly Westernized in modern times? Let’s consider again the case of East Asia. Much of the vocabulary of modern East Asian languages consists today of neologisms acquired since the 19th century through the translation of Western concepts: “philosophy,” “culture,” “society,” “university,” “democracy,” “nation,” “infection,” “cosmology” etc. Today native speakers don’t typically realize that 哲學 (Chinese: zhexue ; Japanese: tetsugaku ; Korean: ch’ŏrhak ; Vietnamese: triết học ) is a foreign term introduced more than a century ago to translate the Western concept and phenomenon of “philosophy.” Since this concept exists now as a nativized neologism in the modern East Asian languages, people project the Western idea of “philosophy” back onto their own history – imposing a radically foreign framework that severely warps their own traditions. Sadly, we cannot solve this problem with the best intentions and fiercest purpose of resistance to Eurocentrism. This is the force of history – of European and Japanese colonialism and Western economic and cultural hegemony since the nineteenth century – of history as it happened. And we cannot turn the clocks of history back.

But we can foster awareness of this linguistic “colonization” that hampers any attempt to write about the premodern past in modern Chinese, Japanese or Korean. We can aim to recover premodern non-Western “humanities,” knowledge cultures, such as the traditional world of letters and literature (文) in Japan and East Asia (Kōno, Denecke et al.). And we can embrace the reality as an invitation to experimenting with our ingrained conceptual biases in English. Consider this patchwork of sentences, with Western-inspired neologisms in italics. Over the past century China has acquired a “ philosophy ,” to stand on a par with Greece, the cradle of Western “ civilization ,” by declaring its masters, such as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi “ philosophers .” Some “ Societies ” in East Asia have been transformed into “ Democracies ” since the Second World War. East Asia is now dotted with “ Universities ” educating “ the People ” of their respective “ Nations ,” among other things in “ National Literature ” and “ National History .” We constantly need to think against this “conceptual screen,” a formidable mosaic of glass ceilings of sorts when trying to understand, and speak or write about, traditional East Asia. Antonio Gramsci and subaltern studies have called attention to underprivileged social classes – colonial subjects, women, children – and promised liberation for individuals, groups, entire regions. Here we have a strangely internalized, disembodied form of the “subaltern”: it is not a person or territory, but the premodern past of non-Western cultures. To riff on Gayatri Spivak’s well-known article “Can the subaltern speak?”: “Can premodern China ‘speak’?.” And how can we talk about it in any language, including modern Chinese, without colonizing its past – since it and we have lost our voice about it through drastic linguistic Westernization?

Here comes the inverse thought experiment, as ridiculous as tragic: imagine that Japan or China had colonized Europe aggressively over the past couple of centuries and that a large part of modern vocabulary of European languages now consisted of Chinese-inspired neologisms coined through translations of Chinese canonical and scholarly texts. Imagine now the platitudes that would appear in an imaginary “History of European philosophy” textbook, overlaid with an East Asian conceptual screen, in our modern, now strongly Sinicized European languages. We might find clichés like this: “Plato was suspicious of shi 詩 and wen 文 and believed that it should not be part of the guo 國 of zhuzi baijia 諸子百家.” Understood? Stepping back from this counterfactual history experiment, we could put this simply as “Plato was suspicious of poetry ( shi ) and literature ( wen ) and believed that it should not be part of the republic ( guo ) of philosophers ( zhuzi baijia ).” First of all, appreciate the fact that with English at least today we hardly have to face the violent imposition of recent foreign neologisms! Next, consider the conceptual gaps: in Chinese shi and wen have often been understood to depict some truthful experience of the poet – not outright “fiction” or “mimesis” in the Platonic sense. This allowed for the peculiar existence of “poet-historians” like the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, one of Chinese most canonical poets, who chronicled the upheavals of his time in verse. Yet, in the Platonic tradition “poetry” was an “artifact” (Greek “poiesis”), something so artificial and devoid of metaphysical truth that Plato banned it from his ideal state. And how could guo , a “state,” ever map on our pride seeking the roots of democracy in the Greek city states and the ideal of the “republic”? Equally alienatingly, Chinese zhuzi baijia , literally “Masters (Literature),” refers to various early thought traditions centered around charismatic master figures (such as Confucius, or Laozi). None of these philosophical masters were interested in developing a project of a “philosophy” searching for universal metaphysical truth, as at least the Platonic tradition (and European tradition, as the Whiteheadian “footnote” to Plato) pursued it. Even just this one sentence from an imaginary reverse-virtual-history textbook should make the enormity of this problem clear.

Imagine a well-educated late 19th-century government official of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) who has slept through the twentieth century and awakens today. The drastic shift from Chinese characters to the han’gul script would be the least of surprises. But how could he make sense of the conceptual screen of Western neologisms that now overlays every single sentence? What would he feel when trying to talk in this new gibberish – about “premodern” Korea, his Chosŏn-period Korea. Excitement? Tingling novelty? Revelation? Humiliation? Rivalry? Depression? Vengefulness? These sentiments have accompanied the engagement between East Asia and the West since the late nineteenth century. Of course, we can also get more cold-blooded and sober about this. Today, as neologisms have built not just new languages, but also new institutions, education systems, and new forms of politics, scholarship, science, pop culture, marriages and everyday lives, they seem little foreign and have their own historical raison d’ être . Still, these problems are a systemic predicament for studying East Asia before the twentieth century, which needs to access the cultural space preceding the colonization of East Asian languages and societies with Western ideas and ideologies. Every time I lay my hands on the keyboard to start writing another sentence for an article or a book I feel the heavy weight of this tantalizing predicament. And I know we can only win, now, by devising detours.

When we aim to also globalize our concepts and methods, we need to first cultivate a relentless awareness of the colonization of today’s East Asian (or South Asian, or African …) languages with Western neologisms and concepts. And we need to apply this to even broader frames of reference: ideologies and world-views that impact institution building (such as humanities disciplines). Never has there been more published historical research than over the past century. Just for Europe, book production has consistently picked up since the fourteenth century; but the past half-century has seen a staggering increase (Roser). Modern mass education, with its mushrooming institution building and faculty, professional intellectuals recruited and evaluated through publication performance, has been producing a daunting output of books. Nineteenth-century historicism, with its post-classical voracity to conquer all periods and places through the lens of history, and postmodernism, with its indulgence in eclectic juxtapositions of historical sound bites, should have made us more history-conscious than ever. Yet, it is astounding how easily current geopolitics can blind us to longer-term historical patterns. While this is less evident in microhistorical studies confined to a single place or culture, which still constitute the bulk of academic output for tenure, this longue-durée amnesia becomes embarrassingly obvious in popular (mis)understanding of premodern worlds. There, geopolitical inequalities and myth-making, based on contemporary hierarchies of economic, political, and cultural power, are typically taken for granted or even exploited for academic fame or financial gain. Take “Sinophoria,” the feverish debates around the recent “rise of China (and Asia).” It is obviously not a rise – but just a come-back, after a brief break, for one of the world’s most persistent transregional hegemonic powers. More dangerous, because less obvious, is the grossly distorting geopolitics of Eurasia. Over the past few decades Eurasia has economically and politically become a “book-end continent,” framed by a mildly declining affluent Western Europe and the vertiginously growing economic powerhouse China.

These maps of the “real world” expose the ideological glass ceilings that remain hidden in scientific geospatial projection. While Europe’s and Japan’s economic power has decreased in relative terms, China has taken a gigantic leap in economic and political terms, as has South Korea. This “book-end continent” has encouraged book-end “East-West” comparisons. The blurb of a new book series on “Chinese-Western Discourse” unabashedly proclaims: “The ever-increasing interactions between the Chinese and the Western World result in fast-paced global transitions. The series has been created to capture these developments, presenting monographs and collections on the Chinese-Western Discourse in the humanities.” Where is the rest of East, South, and Central Asia? The Middle East? (And a good part of the world otherwise?) What actually is “Chinese-Western Discourse”? Is it the Platinum customers’ airport lounge, where you need the right badge? This drastic reductionism of Eurasian cultural history based on blatant geopolitics is all the more shocking, given that much of “Western” arts and sciences survived through and in dialogue with Arabic translations and scholars and that the lion’s share of the scholarly lexicon of modern East Asian languages originating in Western humanities and “Western discourse” was coined in Japan, not China.

Map scaled by 1990 GDP

Citation: Journal of World Literature 6, 4 (2021) ; 10.1163/24056480-20210004

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Map scaled by 2015 GDP

The fetish of “venerable civilizations” and their “splendors” is luckily gradually fading, except in populist propaganda. Over the past decades China historians have shown that the steppe peoples on China’s Northern frontier might have done more for Chinese history than Chinese civilization has done for these supposed “barbarians.” 6 Moreover, weak, dysfunctional states, obliterated and unclaimed states make for the majority of states in world history. To take just one example, the state of 渤海 (K. Parhae ; Ch. Bohai ; J. Bokkai ) which was formidably powerful on the Eastern edge of Eurasia during the eighth through tenth centuries, falls outside the direct genealogies of extant modern Asian states. Covering parts of today’s North Korea, PRC , and Russia, both Koreans and Chinese subsume it in their broader national lineage. This remains a highly sensitive issue. In an “Atlas of the Real 9th-century World” this state would have featured prominently, dwarfing insignificant marginal Japan. Today this state is forgotten, globally, while being played up unduly as a genealogical token in contemporary East Asian politics. Whatever time period we zoom into, it should be our first priority to imagine the contemporaneous geopolitical landscape, the “Atlas of the Real World” at the time. It will probably look rather different from conventional maps in historical atlases that focus on pure spatial representation and on “civilizational centers” inspired by historical lineages of today’s world.

Parhae shows how historical lineages can be played up for geopolitical purposes, but the inverse case is equally problematic: consider the modern suppression of historical genealogies within East Asia. While Europe, despite and because of its ceaseless internecine wars, has gone through many waves of identity building since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 410, with the European Union as its most recent incarnation, East Asia’s Sinographic Sphere fell apart in the twentieth century: it now consists of modern nation states backed by strongly patriotic ideologies. While we currently have more than 500 Million “Europeans,” at least by passport, there currently are no “East Asians,” but only “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “South Koreans” etc. The European Commission declared 2018 its “European Year of Cultural Heritage” in the midst of the crisis over European values triggered by the massive stream of migrants into the Union, by Brexit, and other malaises. By contrast, awareness of a shared East Asian cultural heritage is largely suppressed by regional nationalisms and fraught with lingering emotions and ambivalence towards a millennia-old history of Chinese influence in the region and the aftermath of modern Japanese imperialism.

Comparing premodern pasts can become its own culture war of sorts, a showdown of civilizations, where the very selection of cultures for comparison already decides the game. A compelling new strategy can be “South-South” comparisons, circumventing the West, as demonstrated by Benjamin Elman’s and Sheldon Pollock’s exemplary, truly collaborative What China and India Once Were: The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future (2018). 7 Comparisons of the giants of premodern China and India will increase and promise to illuminate inspiring sets of similarities and incomparabilities, producing concepts and questions for comparison. As a ruse of reason, this will in the end even reshape our understanding of Western cultural history.

• 4 Conclusions: Comparative Global Humanities NOW

Debates about how to globalize our disciplines are central to shaping the current transformation of the humanities. In disciplines with strong claims to universals and equally strong anxiety over cultural relativism, like philosophy, they have recently taken an acerbic tone, as we discussed with Bryan van Norden’s multicultural manifesto. But even for disciplines that have recently drastically expanded their global reach, like literary studies and history, many challenges are looming: how can we go beyond (Western postcolonial) presentism, and think through (and learn from) the great diversity of premodern non-Western worlds? How can we not just open our canons to non-Western traditions, but inspire the creation of new concepts and methods through the productive detour of the world’s other (and older) languages and cultures? And how can we keep expanding partial globalizing initiatives, such as “comparative antiquities,” and both older East-West comparisons and more recent South-South comparisons into more fully-fledged global incarnations of our humanities disciplines?

The vibrancy of new global paradigms and the debates they catalyze is heartening to see. And in the midst of fresh debates about cultural and racial diversity, and rampant social inequality in US society, which the COVID -19 pandemic has grossly magnified for us to see, the diversification and globalization of the humanities has become an even more urgent mission for deans, students, policy makers, and the public alike. Realizing the powerful relevance of comparative global humanities as proposed here should give us reason for tempered optimism and purposeful advocacy. Like environmental and medical humanities, global humanities have an immediate role in assessing and addressing some of the most challenging problems of our time. Since the end of the Cold War fundamentalist nationalisms and extremisms (which tend to abuse classical heritage for nationalist or religious propaganda) and rampant cultural and social inequality (often the effect of the unresolved aftermath of wars, colonization, and mass violence) have notably increased. They have precipitated an unprecedented global migrant crisis, which challenges confidence in our moral convictions and democratic institutions. Postcolonial theorizing, and race, gender, ethnicity studies have been confronting these developments explicitly. But I believe that to create more equal societies in the present we also need to create more equality for other pasts – and learn from all they offer.

Today it is hard to imagine anybody making a sound intellectual case against globalizing our humanities disciplines. I have seen Chinese and American-born-Chinese students complain about universities where professors without any knowledge of Mandarin, let alone expertise in Classical Chinese language and culture, are offering courses in “Chinese philosophy”; and I have heard scholars of Greek philosophy tell me, with sparkling eyes, that “anybody can teach Confucius.” But an ever more diverse student body will not accept this lack of expertise and academic integrity and administrators will have to take measures to protect their institutions’ academic reputation, if philosophy departments themselves do not take appropriate steps to hire experts in Chinese philosophy, or other non-Western thought traditions. There is sheer power in demographic change. It is not the “whether” but the “how” that poses the greatest challenge right now; and the question of where we currently stand. As Haun Saussy recently put it suggestively with his book Are We Comparing Yet? we must ask “Are our disciplines global yet?”

We have seen that this process unfolds quite differently and unevenly across the humanities and that, although some disciplines have come significantly further than others, overall many challenges remain to be tackled. I have proposed three strategies for further leveraging the globalization of the humanities, which I want to restate in closing. First, we need to globalize not just out of disciplinary models, but also area-specific models like Classics. Second, we need to seriously work on our “comparative deficit” and develop comparative methodologies that complement our already rich repertoire of methods considered “comparative,” but actually only applicable to reception- and connection-dependent phenomena. And, third, we should globalize our concepts and methods, not just our canons, and continuously correct our research for implicit metageographical bias favoring the currently powerful regions of the world.

We started by looking at what humanists currently do through humanities centers. I believe that such centers, especially in the US where they are so common, have great potential to contribute to the globalization of our disciplines. As a place where faculty and students of various disciplines and area-specific studies gather they can serve as incubators for the development of transdisciplinary forms of historical studies. This obviously requires appropriate funding and faculty devotion. But we should also empower them structurally, and develop creative ways to make them an indispensable part of our research, teaching, and the everyday lives of our communities. They need to be more than a funding source, a nominal clearing house for activities owned anyway by individual departments, or the stage for the occasional lecture series event where specialists invite specialists from their tribe. Based on my experience so far at various institutions it is hard to override these common patterns, but with more demographic, ideological, and intellectual pressures in favor of diversity, we are bound to try much harder in the years to come.

Humanities centers are also a great platform for global networking of faculty outside of official relations between academic institutions, which are typically conducted by administrators. While globalizing our disciplines we also need to globalize and equalize global participation in them – as I suggested above with “classicists” working in India, China, or Mexico on their own classical heritage. As we have all had to become veterans in online teaching during the pandemic, guest-lecturing and co-teaching through our global networks has become a realistic possibility. I think that even for students of English literature, it can be life-changing to invite English literature colleagues in New Delhi, Moscow, or Beirut, to teach an online session about how Shakespeare, Joyce, or Kipling look from their local corner of globalizing life, teaching and research (note that personal on-screen encounter is crucial here, as the published work of these colleagues is likely to be more streamlined to Western interests and standards of scholarship; it would be even more revelatory if you are able to discuss English literature with these scholars in their local languages, other than English!). The collateral benefit from such a globally inclusive, tech-enabled education, in terms of subject matter, human interaction, and exposure to local experience is precisely the difference that can make the humanities more substantially “global,” worldly, and relevant to our historical moment.

Comparative Global Humanities hold a great promise to contribute to the transformation of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Though it might at first seem counterintuitive, comparative studies of the planet’s premodern worlds and their link to our present could become a transformative nexus in globalizing our humanities disciplines for our world. Due to their consideration of other places and pasts, Comparative Global Humanities make for a field that is epistemologically humble, ethically responsible, publicly involved, and urgently relevant to dealing with some of the greatest challenges of our times: inequality, fundamentalist nationalisms, and, incidentally also, the “crisis” of the humanities.

Greteman; and Mandler “Humanities Crisis?” and “The Rise of the Humanities.”

The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences ( CIPSH ), and the UNESCO are currently compiling a “World Humanities Report” which promises to give us a detailed insight into the global landscape of the humanities and recommendations for action (World Humanities Report).

Akira Iriye traces the emergence of global history since the 1990s in relation to the subfields of diplomatic history, international history, and transnational history (Iriye Chapter 1).

These two frontrunners of global humanistic paradigms have been engaging in a compelling dialogue, as evident in May Hawas’s recent Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History .

For a first-of-its-kind analysis of the development of the Norton world literature anthologies and the Longman Anthology of World Literature from a Japanese and East Asian perspective see Akikusa Part 3.

See di Cosmo and the work of scholars associated with “New Qing History” such as Pamela Crossley, Peter Perdue, or Mark Elliott.

See also Pollock, “The Columbia Global Humanities Project” on efforts to assess and address the challenges of the humanities in the Global South.

• Works Cited

Ahlburg, Dennis, ed. The Changing Face of Higher Education: Is There an International Crisis in the Humanities? London and New York: Routledge, 2019.

Akikusa Shun’ichirō. “Sekai bungaku” wa tsukurareru 1827–2020 . Tokyo: Tokyo UP  2020.

Apter, Emily. Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability . London, New York: Verso, 2013.

Assaad, Ragui, and Dina Abdalla. “The Humanities as the Default Option in Higher Education: the Case of Egypt.” In The Changing Face of Higher Education: Is There an International Crisis in the Humanities? . London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 49–71.

Auslin, Michael. The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region . New Haven and London: Yale UP , 2017.

Ax, Wolfram. “Quattuor Linguae Latinae Aetates. Neue Forschungen zur Geschichte der Begriffe Goldene und Silberne Latinität.” In Text und Stil. Studien zur antiken Literatur und deren Rezeption . Ed. Christian Schwarz. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006, 11–30.

Bayly, Christopher Alan. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons . Malden, MA : Blackwell, 2004.

Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature from Antiquity to the Present Day . Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2015.

Bérubé, Michael and Cary Nelson. Higher Education under Fire. Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities . New York: Routledge, 1995.

Bod, Rens. A New History of the Humanities. The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present . Oxford: Oxford UP , 2013.

Brooks, David. “Our Elites Don’t Get it,” International New York Times 16 Nov. 2017. Web. 18–19 Nov. 2017.

Campello, Filipe, and Mariana Prandini Assis. “Is there a Crisis in the Humanities in Brazil? Ambivalences and Fragilities of a Late Higher Education System.” In The Changing Face of Higher Education: Is There an International Crisis in the Humanities? . Ed. Dennis A. Ahlburg. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 30–47.

Conrad, Sebastian. What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton UP , 2016.

Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the. Web. 8 Jan. 2021.

Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? . Princeton: Princeton UP , 2003.

Denecke, Wiebke. Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons . New York: Oxford UP , 2014.

Derrida, Jacques. Trans. by Peter Pericles Trifonas. Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy . Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Di Cosmo, Nicola. Ancient China and its Enemies: the Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP , 2002.

Dorling, Daniel et al. The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live (2010).

Drayton, Richard and David Motadel. “Discussion: The Futures of Global History.” Journal of Global History 13 (2018), 1–21.

Elman, Benjamin, Sheldon Pollock, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, eds. World Philology . Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 2015.

Elman, Benjamin and Sheldon Pollock. What China and India Once Were: The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future . New York: Columbia UP , 2018.

Felski, Rita, and Susan S. Friedman, eds. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 2013.

Felski, Rita. “Recomposing the Humanities – with Bruno Latour: Introduction.” New Literary History 47:2 and 47:3 (2016), 215–229.

Gänger, Stefanie and Jürgen Osterhammel. “Denkpause für Globalgeschichte.” Merkur 74 (August 2020), 79–86.

Greteman, Blaine. “It’s the End of the Humanities as We Know It – and I Feel Fine.” https://newrepublic.com/article/118139/crisis-humanities-has-long-history . 13 June 2014.

Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road. A New History . New York: Oxford UP , 2012.

Haun Saussy. Are We Comparing Yet? On Standards, Justice, and Incomparability . Bielefeld: Bielefeld UP , 2019.

Humanities Indicators Project. Web. 8 Jan. 2020.

Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History. The Past, Present, and Future . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Juergensmeyer, Mark, Saskia Sassen, Manfred B. Steger, eds. Oxford Handbook of Global Studies . New York: Oxford UP , 2019.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions . Oxford and New York: Oxford UP , 2006.

Kōno Kimiko, Wiebke Denecke, Shinkawa Tokio, and Jinno Hidenori, eds. Nihon bun”gakushi 日本「文」学史 [A New History of Japanese “Letterature”] 3 vols. (Tokyo: Benseisha, 2015–2018).

Liu, Jinyu. “Virgil in Chinese.” In Virgil and His Translators . Eds. Susanna Braund and Zara Torlone. New York: Oxford UP , 2018.

Mandler, Peter. “Humanities Crisis? What Crisis?” Times Higher Education 9 July 2019. Web. 9 July 2015.

Mandler, Peter. “The Rise of the Humanities.” https://aeon.co/essays/the-humanities-are-booming-only-the-professors-can-t-see-it . 17 Dec. 2015.

Most, Glenn W. “Crisis and Criticism.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 89:4 (2015), 602–607.

Pollock, Sheldon. “Comparison Without Hegemony.” In The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science . Eds. Hans Joas and Barbro Klein. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010, 185–204.

Pollock, Sheldon. “Conundrums of Comparison.” Know 1.2 (Fall 2017a), 273–94.

Pollock, Sheldon. “The Columbia Global Humanities Project.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37:1 (2017b), pp. 113–116.

Raab, Nigel A. The Crisis from Within. Historians, Theory, and the Humanities . Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015.

Roser, Max. “Books.” https://ourworldindata.org/books/ . 16 Jan. 2018.

Sachsenmaier, Dominic. Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP , 2011.

Scheidel, Walter. “Comparing Comparisons.” In Ancient Greece and China Compared: Interdisciplinary and Cross-cultural Perspectives . Eds. G.E.R. Lloyd and J.J. Zhao, with Q. Dong. Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2018, 40–58.

Sörlin, Sverker. “Humanities of Transformation: From Crisis and Critique Towards the emerging Integrative Humanities.” Research Evaluation 27:4 (2018), 287–297.

van Norden, Bryan. Taking Back Philosophy. A Multicultural Manifesto . New York: Columbia UP , 2017.

World Humanities Report, the. Web. 5 Apr. 2021.

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Inaugural Dutton Essay Award winner reflects on her Global Humanities education

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Sara Wong is completing her undergraduate degree in Global Humanities this spring. She won the inaugural   Dutton Essay Award in 2023 and served as the chair of the HUMSU (Humanities Student Union). With her future looking bright, Sara discusses with us why she chose Global Humanities. The   Dutton Essay Award , valued at a minimum of $1,100 each, is awarded to undergraduate students who have written an exemplary essay in any Global Humanities course at SFU in the previous three terms. Deadline for the award closes on April 30, 2024.

What inspired you to pursue Humanities at SFU, and how has your experience been?

I loved my English and social studies classes in high school, so I saw Global Humanities as a good blend of the two. The multidisciplinary approach was extremely valuable to me, and it’s something I always point out when explaining the program to others. I’ve taken courses ranging in focus from art history to mass migration.

Though one of my absolute favourites was a course on contemporary Canadian politics with former MP and J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar, Svend Robinson.

Global Humanities gave me a breadth of knowledge, while also honing in on important life skills like communication, critical thinking, and active listening.

Congratulations on receiving the Inaugural Dutton Essay Award last year, can you tell us about your initial thoughts when you first applied and when you found out you won?

Thank you! I’m grateful to have received so much encouragement and other forms of support from the Global Humanities department during my time at SFU. And that extends to all students, not just those in the major program.

Not all academic awards are accessible, so I liked that the Inaugural   Dutton Essay Award was open to undergraduates from any Global Humanities course in the past year.

Dr. Alessandra Capperdoni was the one who prompted me to apply for the inaugural   Dutton Essay Award, using a paper I’d written in one of her classes. I got a pretty high mark on that paper, so I was confident with what I submitted. But there are a lot of fantastic writers out there. I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best, and it worked out well in this case.

Tell us about your experience being the Chair of HUMSU (Humanities Student Union) and how the role impacted your student experience.

Going into SFU, I noticed there was no student group for Humanities like there were for a lot of the other FASS departments. I didn’t plan on starting HUMSU in my first year, but my friends gave me the push I needed.

We were all at the beginning of our SFU journeys, so working together to form a student union helped us better navigate campus life and bond more! Being a part of HUMSU from day one shaped my student experience for the better. Having a dedicated place to study, plan events, or simply hangout was great. Again, the department was really supportive and that openness to connect and collaborate is something I’ll always appreciate.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your experience as a student? Looking ahead, what are your plans after graduation?

I think a lot of what I said above applies here. If I had to pick just one thing though, it would be proving my versatility as a writer. Mostly for my own validation, but it’s useful to have a variety of samples for my portfolio too.

I was an editor with SFU’s student newspaper,  The Peak , in my second and third years. That experience was incredibly meaningful to me because I’m pursuing jobs in publishing (among other arts and culture sectors) and I met so many amazing people along the way.

Stepping back to focus on completing my studies was bittersweet, but it led me to getting work published in the Student Learning Commons’ undergraduate journal and winning the Dutton Essay Award! Now that I’m about to graduate, the priority is finding full-time work. I’m hoping to travel more as well.

Any additional thoughts you would like to share with us?

The   Dutton Essay Award inspired me and everyone else involved in HUMSU last year to expand on opportunities to reward student work. We began the  “Witness to Humanity” contest  with several categories: academic essays, creative writing, and visual art.

The winners’ pieces were published both in print and online. That was like a legacy project for me and I’m proud of how it turned out. HUMSU is running the contest again this year, so stay tuned for more information on the second edition.

Read Sara Wong's award winning essay titled " Exploring the Effects of Hong Kong’s Colonization Through Food"  in the link below Read here

the   dutton essay award

Valued at a minimum of $1,100 each, awarded annually to undergraduate students. Applications must be submitted to ([email protected]) by April 30.

The Humanities Student Union 

HUMSU was established in 1995. Participation in the HUMSU connects students to a group of people with common interests, dedicated to making the most of their university experience. Learn More

Open and Subscribed Educational Resources: UNCA Global Humanities Readers

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What is the UNCA Global Humanities Reader?

The Global Humanities Reader is a collaboratively edited collection of primary sources with student-centered support features. It serves as the core curriculum of the University of North Carolina Asheville’s almost-sixty-year-old interdisciplinary Humanities Program. Its three volumes--Engaging Ancient Worlds and Perspectives (Volume 1), Engaging Premodern Worlds and Perspectives (Volume 2), and Engaging Modern Worlds and Perspectives (Volume 3)--offer accessible ways to explore facets of human subjectivity and interconnectedness across cultures, times, and places. In highlighting the struggles and resilient strategies for surviving and thriving from multiple perspectives and positionalities, and through diverse voices, these volumes course correct from humanities textbooks that remain Western-centric. One of the main features of the The Global Humanities Reader is a sustained and nuanced focus on cultivating the ability to ask questions--to inquire--while enhancing culturally aware, reflective, and interdisciplinary engagements with the materials. The editorial team created a thoroughly interactive text with the following unique features that work together to actualize student success:

· Cross-cultural historical introductions to each volume

· Comprehensive and source-specific timelines highlighting periods, events, and people around the world

· An introduction for each source with bolded key terms and questions to facilitate active engagement 

· Primed and Ready questions (PARs)--questions just before and after a reading that activate students’ own knowledge and skills 

· Inquiry Corner--questions consisting of four types: Content, Comparative, Critical, and Connection

· Beyond the Classroom--explore how ideas discussed in sources can apply to broader social contexts, such as job, career, project teams or professional communities

· Glossary of Tags--topical ‘hubs’ that point to exciting new connections across multiple sources

These volumes reflect the central role of Humanities in deepening an empathic understanding of human experience and cultivating culturally appropriate and community-centered problem-solving skills that help us flourish as global and local citizens.

Interested in how UNCA's Global Humanities Readers came to be? Please read the story of their creation here: 

UNC ASHEVILLE RE-IMAGINES THE HUMANITIES CORE A Data-Driven, Student-Centered and Community-Led Curriculum Revision that Goes Beyond Traditional Textbooks

How to Access UNCA's Global Humanities Readers

UNC Asheville's Global Humanities Readers for our Humanities 124 and Humanities 214 classes are available as ebooks in Ramsey Library's  Home Grown Ebooks Collection database. Click on the database and then search for 'Global Humanities Reader' to find all volumes. Off campus users will need to authenticate using their UNCA credentials.

These direct links will also work (requires UNCA authentication):

• Global Humanities Reader Volume 1 - Engaging Ancient Worlds and Perspectives
• Global Humanities Reader Volume 2 - Engaging Premodern Worlds and Perspectives
• Global Humanities Reader Volume 3 - Engaging Modern Worlds and Perspectives

Alternative access from library.unca.edu : click on ' Online Resources ' (right-hand side), scroll down to Home Grown Ebooks Collection, and then search 'Global Humanities Reader.' UNCA authentication required.

Access for students of North Carolina's other educational institutions (including ASU, WCU, other UNC System Schools, K-12 schools, community colleges, independent colleges and universities): go to your institution's library webpage and look for either NCLive or the Home Grown Ebooks Collection from their list of subscribed library databases. This will route you to the correct authentication portal to provide full-text access. If NCLive, you will find a link to Home Grown Ebooks from the  nclive.org/browse  page. Once there, search for 'Global Humanities Reader' for access to both volumes. For help, please contact your institution's library staff or see  nclive.org/help .

Access for North Carolina Public Library Members: visit the Home Grown Ebooks Collection database from  nclive.org/browse  and search for 'Global Humanities Reader' to find both volumes. You will need to authenticate using your current NC public library card credentials. For assistance please contact staff at your public library or see  nclive.org/help .

All users are encouraged to create a free Biblioboard account in the Home Grown Ebooks Collection in order to save bookmarks, take notes, and save the Global Humanities Readers as favorites (making it easier to find them the next time you log in).

If you have issues or questions accessing these ebooks, please chat with a librarian directly at  library.unca.edu or email us at [email protected]

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Global Humanities Reader

Volume 1 - engaging ancient worlds and perspectives, edited by brian s. hook , sophie mills , katherine c. zubko , keya maitra.

548 pp., 7 x 10, 12 images, notes, index, 47 timelines

• Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6640-2 Published: January 2022
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Responding to the Climate Threat: Essays on Humanity’s Greatest Challenge

A new book co-authored by MIT Joint Program Founding Co-Director Emeritus Henry Jacoby

From the Back Cover

This book demonstrates how robust and evolving science can be relevant to public discourse about climate policy. Fighting climate change is the ultimate societal challenge, and the difficulty is not just in the wrenching adjustments required to cut greenhouse emissions and to respond to change already under way. A second and equally important difficulty is ensuring widespread public understanding of the natural and social science. This understanding is essential for an effective risk management strategy at a planetary scale. The scientific, economic, and policy aspects of climate change are already a challenge to communicate, without factoring in the distractions and deflections from organized programs of misinformation and denial. 

Here, four scholars, each with decades of research on the climate threat, take on the task of explaining our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language―importantly, without losing critical  aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, published during the 2020 presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and through the fall of 2021, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.  

Each of the essays provides an opportunity to learn about a particular aspect of climate science and policy within the complex context of current events. The overall volume is more than the sum of its individual articles. Proceeding each essay is an explanation of the context in which it was written, followed by observation of what has happened since its first publication. In addition to its discussion of topical issues in modern climate science, the book also explores science communication to a broad audience. Its authors are not only scientists – they are also teachers, using current events to teach when people are listening. For preserving Earth’s planetary life support system, science and teaching are essential. Advancing both is an unending task.

About the Authors

Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the MIT Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy analysis in application to the threat of global climate change.

Richard Richels directed climate change research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He served as lead author for multiple chapters of the IPCC in the areas of mitigation, impacts and adaptation from 1992 through 2014. He also served on the National Assessment Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Ben Santer is a climate scientist and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He contributed to all six IPCC reports. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC report which concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.

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View the book on the publisher's website  here .

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Global Health Humanities Essays

Humanities Futures at the Franklin Humanities Institute has published a series of Global Health Humanities Essays. You can read them here .

This set of essays from the Global Health Humanities Working Group includes two explorations, by Gregg Mitman and Alvan Ikoku, of the troubled imbrications of “Africa” in the historical development and visual imaginary of global health. Two fascinating and moving personal essays from the Breath | Body| Voice conference by Juan Obarrio and Alan Bleakley that jnspire a new, holistic way of thinking about health, illness, and memory. It also proposes new ways of thinking and new forms of publishing with comic illustrations (“The Health Humanities and the Future of Publishing” by Craig Klugman) and a think piece that is made up entirely of drawings (“Frames of Thought” by Nick Sousanis).

Theorizing the Emergence of Global Health Humanities is convened by Deborah Jenson (Romance Studies & Global Health / Franklin Humanities Institute) and Kearsley “Karrie” Stewart (Duke Global Health Humanities). * Image: Little Crippled Haiti (2006) by Edouard Duval Carrié.

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Global Health Humanities, a June Special Issue

Podcast: Brandy speaks to Narin Hassan and Jessica Howell about the June Special Issue: Global Health Humanities

This timely special issue presents research in the emerging field of Global Health Humanities. Authors hail from different disciplinary backgrounds, including Medical Humanities, literary studies, film and visual media, the history of public health, rhetoric, women’s and gender studies, medicine, and physical therapy. Their work critically engages global health histories, medical intervention and education, as well as the representation in art and culture of illness and healing in a global context. While some articles focus on specific local cultural contexts, such as the Dominican Republic, Africa, America, India, Iran, or Canada, other authors take a comparative perspective, or reflect on Global Health Humanities scholarship and its developing methodologies and priorities. Authors also think through how specific embodied experiences, such as scarf injury, transplantation, fertility and childbirth, or long-COVID, reflect the political legacies of colonialism, sexism, racism, and other contributing factors tohealth disparities such as ableism and language elitism. The co-editors, Narin Hassan and Jessica Howell, also reflect on how Global Health Humanities scholarship can respond to current unfolding health crises through responsive and self-reflective praxis.

Narin Hassan is Associate Professor and Director of Global Media and Cultures (MS-GMC) in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is author of Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility (Ashgate, 2011). She has published essays on topics related to Victorian literature and culture, colonial/postcolonial studies, critical yoga studies, and medical humanities in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, WSQ, Mosaic, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Race and Yoga , and in a number of book collections. Her current research examines gendered conceptions of the mind, body, and spirituality in colonial contexts and within contemporary cultures of yoga. She serves as the President of INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies).

BRANDY SCHILLACE: Hello and welcome back to the Medical Humanities Podcast . This is Brandy Schillace, Editor-in-Chief. And today I have with me Jessica Howell, who’s a Professor at Texas A&M, and also Narin Hassan, who is Associate Director of the graduate program in Global Media and Cultures at Georgia Tech. They have some very exciting things to tell us about Global Health Humanities, which is a special issue going to be appearing with us in June. And I also know that Jessica is head of a program from which this kind of developed. So, welcome, both of you, and maybe you can tell us all a bit more about yourselves.

HOWELL: Thank you Brandy My name is Jessica Howell. I’m Professor of English at Texas A&M University, and I’m also Associate Director for the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research where I run an initiative in Global Health Humanities. And this is essentially where the interest for this special issue grew. I’ve been a Health Humanities scholar and teacher, as well as teaching in English literature for a good bit of time. And I was noticing that there was an emerging research interest in global health in the Humanities, and I was so lucky to be joined by Narin Hassan, Narin Hassan as my Co-Editor. Narin, did you want to  introduce yourself?

NARIN HASSAN: Yes, thank you. I am Narin Hassan. I am an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. And as Brandy mentioned, I’m also a Director of a new graduate program that’s a collaborative program between my department, which is Literature, Media, Communication and the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech. And it’s a collaborative program called Global Media and Cultures. And my work is largely looking at the 19th century and intersections of gender, health, and colonialism in the 19th century. And I was lucky as a graduate student to actually be a graduate student at the University of Rochester, which had a Medical Humanities program, one of the early programs at their medical school. So, as a graduate student, I taught a number of courses in that Medical Humanities program and then continued to do some research in that area.

SCHILLACE: Yeah, and that’s exciting. Actually, I know a bit about the Rochester program, and that’s kind of exciting too. I think one of the things that interests me about what our project here at Medical Humanities , we define it quite broadly. And I know that in some areas, right, people think of Medical Humanities as coming, as really being about literature in medicine, which it sometimes is, or narrative medicine, which it sometimes is, but it’s much broader than that. And so, here at Medical Humanities , we have people from anthropology, history, literature, the medical sciences, social science, social justice all coming together. And so, that’s one of the reasons why I found your proposal for a Global Health Humanities special issue so intriguing is that it does have a broad base. So, I wondered if you could say a bit more. I know that kind of came out of some of the work you were both already doing. How did you bring it together, and what can people expect from this special issue when it hits this June?

HOWELL: Sure. Well, we essentially met through our common networks in 19th Century Studies. I also study literature of empire, health, and the environment. And so, Narin and I knew each other through those networks, and it was through Narin’s previous work and her interest in Health Humanities that we decided to form this collaboration. If we can define the Health Humanities as understanding cultural practices and products related to health and illness, this special issue is really poised to embrace a global turn to understanding these kinds of practices in a global context. So, we do think of it really broadly in terms of different forms of human expression, which of course, very much include literature and literary forms, but also film and visual media, the history of specific terms and concepts related to global health as well as Global Health Humanities as a field itself, and how it articulates itself in relationship to Health Humanities and in relationship to the history of the Medical Humanities as a field. So, there’s also a kind of self-reflective quality to some of the articles that are appearing in this special issue to think about how is Global Health Humanities differing from Health Humanities? How is it innovating? And then also, what are its relevant kind of scholarly backgrounds and traditions that inform the practice?

SCHILLACE: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

HASSAN: I’ll just add that when Jessica contacted me, it was a sort of follow-up to a conference that we were both at, the Interdisciplinary 19th Century Studies Conference. So, it was back in 2019. And at that conference, I had organized a roundtable on teaching race and empire in the 19th century that Jessica attended. And she kind of followed up after the conference. And so, I just wanted to add that both of us are sort of coming from backgrounds that are historical and also literary and cultural, but we also see in our issue and think it’s really important to represent scholars from a variety of fields. So,  Jessica has mentioned the various fields that are represented, but also, scholars who are doing different kinds of work. So, there’s pieces that are sort of looking, that are like teams working on particular topics. There are single-authored pieces. There’s scholars coming from different methodological places and backgrounds, but also scholars coming from a variety of different stages of their careers.

SCHILLACE: Right.

HASSAN: So, that was something we were really trying to do with the issue is, I think our goal was to take the broad approach in as many ways as possible and to sort of think about expanding the field and expanding the ways in which we think about the terms “global” and “health” and “humanities.”

HOWELL: Right.

SCHILLACE: Yeah, I appreciate that because, here at MH , one of the things that we’ve been working hard on and we just launched this year, officially launched, we’ve been practicing working on it already, is path to publication, which is an attempt to broaden out who can submit, effectively, a special issue. Because it is a lot of hard work as you can both attest to.

SCHILLACE: Getting published if you are from, say, the Global South and you don’t have the access to opening or even reading some of the essays that we have, if they’re behind paywalls, or you’re not being asked to be part of those conversations, yet you’re spoken about, but not necessarily heard from. And so, we’ve been trying to expose, there’s a lot about publishing that is unfortunately exclusionary, and we’re trying to make it more inclusive. And one of the ways of doing that is creating special issues that allow people time and gestation and a community to surround that, to help all of the articles be stronger. And so, I think you guys experienced that as well. I wanna say it was almost, what, almost two years that you worked on this prior to publication?

HOWELL: Yeah, the inception of it was even before then. And I should say before we turn to thinking about how it has tracked, a very, a time of global upheaval and a time when global health has become of even more urgent interest in conversation, I just wanted to mention that though we have this diversity in terms of both the professional development of our different authors as well as the areas that they discuss. So, we have articles that are about the Dominican Republic, Africa, America, India, Iran, Canada, and the Mediterranean, and we have scholars that are in universities not based in America, for example, in the UK. So, there’s that kind of representation of diversity.

But there’s also, I would say, a kind of cross-cutting aspect which we explore in our introduction that many of the articles, that they come from different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds. Many of them engage cross-cutting topics like health inequity, access to care in a global context, gendered health disparities, the legacies of colonialism in terms of kind of neocolonial health infrastructure, and then also human health and displacement and the refugee experience, as well as the emerging, current, and very urgent topic of COVID-19 and the Health Humanities. And so, there are these cross-cutting, I would say, inquiries and interests that are really what we would call outlining the key considerations of Global Health Humanities as an emerging field. But then before we, I wanted to turn over to Narin to talk about how it’s been a long-standing project, but also one that’s been evolving in real time.

SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.

HASSAN: Yeah. I tried to go back and kind of look at the timeline be cause   it all seems so far away now! But it was back in, I guess, March 2019 that Jessica and I were both at the same conference, and she contacted me soon after. And it was around May 2019 that we started to think about the call and started to get some of that out there. So, it was right around the beginning of 2020 that we actually received the initial drafts. And then, of course, a lot of things changed as we hit spring 2020, which was a year in the project. And Jessica and I kept sort of feeling like the longer we were in the pandemic moment, we had to keep sort of rethinking and resituating the project itself and the kinds of questions we were trying to pose. So, we went through a very long process of sort of digging through different layers of, okay, where are we going with this? How can we look at the global and the local in this moment? How could we think about the different clusters and sections that we have? How are they changing? So, when we initially thought about the project, issues of migration and the refugee question, there was sort of a core section that was focused on that. And then we realized we really needed to address the pandemic.

And so, we went through a lot of different processes of, how do we add sections to this? How do we reframe what we actually have? And along the way, I mean, another thing that sort of went on over the course of the last three years is we were also addressing our own experience of isolation, all of the sort of disruptions of 2020. We were dealing with a lot of that from our contributors. We really had to change the way that we were working and thinking. We were dealing with our own sort of stress around aging parents, health issues. So, there were a lot of ways that this sort of personal kind of just jumped in and that the moment really impacted where the project was going. And it really has felt like a whole sort of process of layering is the word that keeps coming to mind, building and then reshaping that has happened in the last three years.

SCHILLACE: It’s really interesting. I’ve been working with and talking to Stuart Murray, who’s also on the Board of Medical Humanities , Editorial Board of Medical Humanities . And they’re working on a project right now with the Wellcome, and we are trying to help track it in real time through podcasts to say like, because projects evolve. And so, it’s interesting. We’ve just done that, really, with you, and this project has evolved. Unfortunately, we didn’t document it the way we’re trying to do with Stuart Murray’s project. But I think that there’s a reality, there’s an illusion that these projects sort of arrive fully formed, then are sent to publishers, and then just suddenly arrive in publication and print, when in fact, there’s so much shaping that goes on from my end, as an editor, but also from the guest editors before the papers get to me, and then again through the revision processes, through the helpful comments of people who are readers and engage with the work. And that continues to go on because the blog is open for people to respond to the special issue after it publishes. So, I think, hopefully we are seeing the end of the imaginary sort of ivory tower, fully formed ideas springing from the forehead of Zeus, and it’s much more of a collaborative and communal process.

HOWELL: Yeah. And I think that in fact we, in the introduction as well as in, as you say, the process of revision with all of the contributors, we tried to make this self-reflective, evolving process of scholarship actually the topic. So, rather than trying to gloss it over, but instead, we realized that Health Humanities scholarship can really embrace that self-reflexivity of saying, “How do I think about autonomy differently? How do I think of vulnerability differently? How do I think of global interconnection differently?”

So, in fact, in one of the series of revisions, when we gave feedback to the authors, if their essays were not about COVID-19 explicitly, but they mentioned the pandemic as an emerging context to their work, we asked them to actually kind of deepen that inquiry and say, “What is my positionality in relationship to the pandemic? What do I bring to my consideration of this emerging crisis?” And so, and just as you say, in the introduction, we actually reflect back, Narin and I do, on the different changes that the issue has undergone. So, I think that one of the really promising potentialities within Health Humanities research is to—and COVID-19 has brought this into really stark relief—is to make the process of self-reflection and embodiment actually the topic of scholarship, not just the background.

SCHILLACE: Absolutely. I think it’s a process of showing your work, really. And that is something, if I may say, and I think your issue is emblematic of this, or at least representative of this, that that illusion, that sense of a fully formed project is also one that carries with it a lot of white, Western, and often masculine baggage. There used to be a kind of academic expectation that you didn’t show these things. They were considered weaknesses instead of diversity.

HOWELL: Mmhmm.

SCHILLACE: The diversity was considered a weakness instead of a strength. That there was a point at which you would never, bring your, oh, well, you’re ill. You don’t talk about that. Or you have sick parents. You don’t talk about that. And I am 100 percent against us laying that to rest because we are human beings. We are a community. Pretending that we don’t have these struggles is deeply injurious, especially to, I think, early career scholars who feel like they have to somehow fall in line or ape this kind of behavior. And so, it’s really powerful. And I, again, I think you’re right. I think COVID has driven this home even further for us to realize yeah, you know, we are wearing shorts under the table on that Zoom call. [chuckles] You know, we, like, it’s just, it’s just a thing. We’re living beings.

HOWELL: Mmhmm. Yeah, absolutely. And coping with loss and also acknowledging people’s relative positions of privilege when that exists, right? That our stressors are different than the stressors that some of our colleagues across the globe are dealing with. So, all of that opportunity and responsibility really, I think, is brought to light by the topic of global health and the Humanities.

HASSAN: Yeah, I’ll just add that I feel like that is what has made the project sort of deeper and in terms of just sort of thinking about process. This was an amazing collaborative experience for me because Jessica and I don’t know each other that well, like just from seeing each other at conferences, and had never collaborated before. But once we were in 2020 and sort of going through the bulk of this project in the last two years, we did so much through Zoom, and we became so good at that, right?!

HOWELL: [laughs]

HASSAN: And our meetings became a really great space of connection, but also, we did a lot of writing while on Zoom. So, the process itself was unfolding during the pandemic, and we were able to use Google Docs and Zoom and all of these other forums to continue with the project. But those spaces also became spaces for us to be more open with each other about who we are as human beings, how we are caregivers, how we are giving in many different ways, and how the stresses of the moment are really bringing that to the core. So, as much as this is clearly, you know, it’s an academic project, we’re working with a group of scholars, there’s a lot that’s sort of around all that that we were trying to also address, right, to really think about who we are in this moment, working in this way, and trying to bring some of these questions to the world in a different way.

SCHILLACE: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was wondering, since we have just this space to entice people to come and read the essays involved, what are some things that you hope people will be excited to see? What are some topics that you want to encourage? This is kind of our sales pitch as well. This is a great special issue. What should people come for, and what should they stay for?

HOWELL: Well, we can maybe take turns. Narin, I can talk about, there’s several different clusters, and so, we can talk about the highlights from each. And I’ll just start off by saying that the first cluster we have of essays is titled Nation, Biopolitics, and Narrative and thinks about the biopolitical links between global health and colonial history, specifically by focusing on reading literary text and film. So, we have an opening essay by Sandhya Shetty thinking about Katherine Mayo’s Mother India in terms of global health and security. And she does a really careful close reading of that novel, in particular thinking about Indian bodies and spaces. And then we have, continuing with the focus on India and representation, we have Meenakshi Srihari’s essay, which thinks about narrative arcs of organ transplantation within literature and film. So, we start out by thinking about how, as Narin mentioned before, you can bridge kind of local and global considerations by thinking about a particular representation of a particular place, which is India, in terms of both written and visual texts. The final essay in the first cluster is by Matthew Spencer and Lava Asaad, which weaves issues of migration and representation by thinking about a doctor’s experience in literature, working with refugees, and narrating that experience through memoir. And then maybe Narin, do you want to talk about women’s health?

HASSAN: Okay, great. So, yeah, our second section is on women’s health in global context. And in that section, we have an essay by Anna Kemball, which looks at American Indian birth experiences and speculative fiction. And then we have a piece by Anna Tupetz and a whole team of researchers who are working on looking at female scarf injuries in Bangladesh. And so, those two pieces are taking really different approaches. One is more of sort of Gender Studies, Literary Studies scholarship. The other one is a little bit more anthropological and is sort of a more practice-based sort of project. And then do you wanna go on to the next one, Jessica, which is more on global concepts and history and politics?

HOWELL: Sure. So, as I mentioned in the introductory conversation, we wanted to make sure to have a section that was dedicated to where some of the key terms and concepts related to global health and the Humanities have come from, what are their legacies. And so, we have an article by Mari Webel on the history of the concept of neglected tropical diseases. So, she thinks about how, within a historical framework, this term of “neglected tropical diseases” has arisen through history and how it relates to public health institution and discourse. Brenda Wilson further then thinks about how in Kenya, again, in a more applied setting in this case, how language elitism affects maternal health outcomes in Kenya. And then finally, Raquel Baldwinson thinks about what our responsibilities are as Health Humanities scholars when we engage with the field of global health and what kinds of critical tendencies she sees arising in the global health communities, and how those need to kind of remain nuanced in understanding the real lived challenges that people are facing around the globe in terms of their health crises. And so, this section really focuses on zooming out, if you will, to think a bit about where we are and where we’ve come from in terms of key terms and concepts around global health.

SCHILLACE: Nice.

HASSAN: Yeah. I’ll just end with the last section is called COVID-19 and the Future of Health Humanities . And those questions of sort of nuance and zooming out sort of continue in this section. This is a section that we added later on in 2020. And there are two pieces in this section, and both of them are really getting us to think about COVID-19 and how the questions of this moment sort of ask us to think ahead or to rethink the ways that we’ve thought about terms and thought about Health Humanities. So, the first piece is by Rosemary Jolly, and that essay is looking at contact zones and political and environmental histories in relation to global health. And the last essay is by Jessica, Jessica Howell. And that piece is looking at literary and historical contexts as a way to think about contemporary health futures. So, we end the collection with that piece as a sort of looking back, but also looking forward and sort of thinking about the broader theoretical questions that are at stake and the different ways that we can think about the terms that we’ve been addressing throughout the collection.

SCHILLACE: That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful.

HOWELL: Yeah, and one of the methodologies, I think, that this final section offers is thinking about how something like oral history or interviewing can become part of Health Humanities scholarship, where, well, it already is, but how it can grow in real time to think about people’s lived experiences during a time like the pandemic. So, what could we do in terms of creating interviews and texts out of people’s lived experiences and then incorporating those into Health Humanities scholarship?

SCHILLACE: No, I think they’re all really wonderful pieces, and I think we’ve been very lucky to get them in and get them through. It’s particularly that you sort of had to add on. I mean, you guys met in the halcyon days before COVID-19, and yet you managed through the course of this process to get those topics in as well. And I think that is something that we do try to build in at MH by having these longer gestation periods for special issues, is the opportunity to address real-time issues that are happening unexpectedly in the middle of everything else. And I think that that’s a strength. That’s a real strength of the issue.

I am so glad both of you could join me today, and I really want everyone to check out the upcoming special issue. Also, our blog, which is very robust and is treated almost like its own online publication in some ways is carrying lay descriptions provided by the authors for the pieces that appear. And so, it also helps broaden the conversation out to non-specialist audiences. So, and that’s not behind a paywall. So, please do join us for this wonderful special issue on Global Health Humanities. And also check out the work of our guests today. Is there anything you want to leave us with?

HOWELL: Oh, I think  that this issue is also an invitation for further collaboration between Humanities scholars and those who are health practitioners in a global context to think about how individuals’ stories and experiences can be incorporated into our understanding and practice of global health.

SCHILLACE: Well, thank you again. Thank you both, and thanks to all of our listeners for being part of the conversation.

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• Contributors
• The New Humanities?

David Ferris University of Colorado, Boulder

These remarks are an attempt to understand and recognize some of the forces that have produced the current situation of the humanities.

These remarks are an attempt to understand and recognize some of the forces that have produced the current situation of the humanities, specifically why any discussion of the humanities is confronted with the task of displacing its significance from its present state and into the protective fold of an imagined future. Why the contemporary discussion of the humanities has taken this form at this point in the history of the university is a question central to these remarks. Equally central is the attempt (since this is one of the questions proposed by rubric under which these Humanities Futures seminars are conceived) to determine what paradigm this development adheres to and, of course, whether the Kuhnian paradigm should be considered as itself an historical understanding rather than an understanding of historical change. I will argue that the humanities have been shifted toward a paradigm that is not of their own making and therefore they have not so much undergone an internal paradigmatic change but are facing something that looks like a Hobsonian choice: the choice that demands that the humanities conform to the scientific and technological (read STEM) models on which decisions about the significance of intellectual work in the university and, indeed, the future of the university are now increasingly made. The result of this change in the university is that the humanities are now faced with the risk of entering into a conflict with the university itself, and perhaps never more so than when the humanities invoke the past and their own history within the university as their rationale for survival. (This observation is not a judgment about the importance of the past in the humanities but rather a strategic observation, given the nature of this juncture for the humanities.) Our adoption of this recourse to the future as the axiomatic point of focus and as the decisive place where our significance is to be decided is a recognition of this conflict, but it is also an acquiescence to the increasingly uncritical methodologies of inquiry (and their technological means of delivery) that now animate discussions of the future of the university and have become the quantifiable measure on which knowledge as something that must produce advancement now rests. To put this situation historically, what we face is one consequence of the Enlightenment project in which our disciplines or faculties were first forged.

Which disciplines and fields are best for the best possible world to come?

It is this project that the modern university has brought to its logical conclusion by condensing the Enlightenment imperative toward progress into one essential guiding question: which disciplines and fields are best for the best possible world to come? When the answer demands demonstrable outcomes, then those disciplines that have been shaped from the beginning according to such outcomes will be considered essential, and what else remains runs the risk of becoming symbolic.

The Future? Demands of the Measurable Outcome? Or, There Are Symbols, but Not for Us?

The form in which we consider the future of the humanities is the subject of this essay. I emphasize this aspect because it seems to me that it provides the best entry into the questions that now beset the different fields of the humanities. Above all, the prospect of the transformation of these according to a model of innovation borders on an entrepreneurial/business model. (Professional master degrees are now the template that any new master degree in the humanities must now conform to at my own institution.) We are faced with the task of reinvigorating what we do in order to claim a significant place within the increasingly constrictive form of a modern university that has embraced technological means as an end in itself rather than retain both means and method as objects of inquiry. To simply sense a critique of the technological in these words would be to misconstrue my point. What is intended is a recognition of the technological in its limits, which means, nowadays, a recognition of the university in its limits. That will sound a little too abstract to most deans, so I will try to make that intention more concrete in what follows. For now, I mention it in order to frame this essay about the future as it figures in the phrase "the future of the humanities" and how, in that phrase, we are compelled to adopt the dominant rhetoric of the contemporary university: the imperative to affirm the future as the time that will resolve the conditions, both good and bad, of the present so that we may supersede the past and its supposedly limiting influence on our development. It is this imperative that drives the technological to the forefront of how the university now rationalizes the core of its existence.

Present hope rather than future hope is, I think, something more like what is needed.

Here, the Enlightenment from which the modern university emerged has now been constricted to a temporal narrative in which the past no longer has authority with respect to the future. This narrative has built into it the production of an amnesia about the past; this is why no assertion of the past as a crucial object to study will have relevance in a present that is resolutely tied to the future as its only justifiable significance. Once the future has been given the authority to shape the present, once it has become the touchstone of survival, then we may only be left a pessimistic version of that infamous saying by Kafka: there is hope but not for us. But we should not take this as pessimistic or lying down like Gregor Samsa lest we wish to remain so. We should remember that Kafka was merely commenting on our fate if we turn to the future as the always to hand solution to a present dilemma. Present hope rather than future hope is, I think, something more like what is needed.

A Matter of Rubrics: Does the Paradigm Shift or Does It Only Constrict?

The rubric for these seminars is poised between, on the one hand, uncovering distinctive and new ways in which the humanities can be configured for the future, and on the other, posing questions about the long-term effects of such innovations on the history of the humanities, their traditions, and their methods of critical inquiry. Here there is a conflict and the question is whether this conflict is the sign of a shift that has already occurred but has not yet taken institutional form. One assumption made by our rubric is that, if a paradigm shift has occurred, it has taken place within the humanities and their contemporary history. It is this assumption I would like to confront by posing the question of whether the only paradigm that has changed is that of the university itself and that the presence of different methodologies within the humanities—or what we might prefer to call "approaches"—is the form in which we have registered this change by institutionalizing historical, social, political, and theoretical questions into circumscribed fields of study in order to stand against how the university has aligned its reason for existence according to a demonstrable and quantifiable future. Thus, I wish to add the following question to our discussion, and with more emphasis than is given in the rubric: the question of the changed significance and organization of the university in recent decades, changes whose origin and complexity can be minimized by accepting the narrative of economic challenges in the sheen of a future that takes the form of rationalizing humanities disciplines into ersatz communities of subjects, that is, the grouping of more and more fields of study within the arts and humanities into internal schools whose future offers the promise that such new intellectual communities preserve the humanities in the face of preceding, instrumental budgetary decisions. I mention this development in order to highlight not only the institutional grounds on which academic existence is already being shaped, but also to demarcate clearly that the contemporary decision about the significance of the humanities now rests upon a future, upon what we are to become rather than what we are or have been. The rhetoric that accompanies the phrase "the future of the humanities" is the form in which what was formerly called the crisis of the humanities has taken refuge without witnessing the nature of that crisis and its rhetoric.

The Present Crisis: Fictions of the Real?

If we ask when this change occurred, it is tempting to answer quickly that it is a phenomenon of the centrifugal movement of the humanities in recent decades. It would be a mistake (and indeed go against what we in the humanities do best) to accept this claim without at least some historical perspective. In 1969, there appeared a special issue of the journal Daedalus which published a collection of essays developed after a conference held in what is now a very overdetermined date, May 1968. The title of the conference and the journal special issue is "The Future of Humanities." The author of the introduction to this issue summarizes four themes from the discussions, which are here cited briefly:

Humanities as practiced today are by their nature valid. The humanities already have found the means for making effective decisions and commitments in today’s world. A change in the approach and content of scholarship and teaching is essential. The crisis is imminent.

This summary emphasizes an internal disconnectedness even at a time when the institutional existence of the humanities was taken for granted. How a body of knowledge can be by its nature valid and still face an imminent crisis already betrays a fault line which may be a condition of our modern humanities. The fact that this was already discerned almost fifty years ago underscores just how conflicted a debate about the future of humanities will be, and some might add, should be. But there is another observation to make here. Is this a productive or a paralyzing conflict? How is that that 1969 account of the situation of the humanities already defines, all amnesia apart, the situation we now find ourselves in and does so before the unprecedented growth of higher education and the university system in the 1970s?

The reference points that frame these four observations already confine any debate to the present and the future, and so without recognition of a past. The first two emphasize "today" and express satisfaction with the way things are: the humanities have validity in the present and they are relevant to today’s world, although it is not clear if the decisions are themselves effective or whether the humanities are good at putting decisions into effect. As if aware of this uncertainty in the present, the last two observations inject into this halcyon present (undisturbed by validity) the necessity of change, and then all stakes are raised by introducing the spectre of a crisis as the inducement to implement such change. This is not to say that our sense of crisis is not real, rather it is to note the pervasiveness of the Schmittian paradigm: crisis is unquestioningly adopted to precipitate change by means of asserting an impasse that cannot be overcome except by evoking a state of emergency that has now become the normative state.

How a body of knowledge can be by its nature valid and still face an imminent crisis already betrays a fault line which may be a condition of our modern humanities.

We have lived through both crisis and change in the humanities, so much so that these two aspects might be regarded by many as the future into which the humanities were about to step in 1969 as confidence in that era’s sense of natural validity for the humanities evaporated. To a large extent such validity was replaced by the sense of intellectual adventure that gripped the 1970s and that made the humanities a welcome venue for a multifaceted attention to the whole spectrum of cultural objects as well as their political and geographical underpinnings. I argue here that we are now living the consequences not of that expanded attention (as if it were a force destructive to the humanities), but rather of the failure to translate this explosion of critical thought into structured programs of study. Instead, we produced an unproductive and prolonged internal conflict between one approach or another, a conflict that did not admit either common cause but merely created a conflictual environment for emerging fields of study which felt compelled to vie for the disciplinary rights and autonomy to protect the kind of questions and issues that could not be asked by the parent fields from which they sought to separate themselves. The administrative compromise to this situation has been to adopt a hierarchy of significance: some fields of study will have departmental status, some will be programs, and, at the weakest level, some will be merely groupings of faculty pursuing intellectual questions in a context whose interdisciplinarity cannot be absorbed into the preexisting structures for teaching, research, and professional evaluation. This compromise has simply compounded the questions we face and which have been evaded until the appearance of a situation or crisis or state of emergency that forces change if a future is to be maintained—in the form of a crisis from which the repetition of the conditions of that crisis are concealed.

What should not be missed in the preceding paragraph is that the adoption of such a hierarchy is a judgment about the contingency of change in the humanities as well as the containment of an already emergent humanities that neither relies on natural validity nor turns to a progressive model in order to assert the significance of the humanities. Here, it should be noted that such deficiencies (such as a loss of natural validity) were not created by the critical development of the humanities and their expansion but by the institutional paradigm that equated disciplines with natural fields of study. The conflation of national identity and discipline is the most obvious example of this.

The establishment of Comparative Literature in the United States in the 1950s was already a sign of the beginning of the movement away from the institutional paradigm within which the humanities and its primary disciplines were formed. However, as I have argued elsewhere (see "Indiscipline"), the field of Comparative Literature was confronted with a model of significance for the humanities that demanded definition according to geographical and political terms, a limitation that made Comparative Literature ripe for the critical and theoretical growth it fostered in the 1970s and 1980s before the disciplinary imperative completed its circle and a lack of identity became its disciplinary claim. At the same time, the seductive lure of a continuing state of crisis about its identity became its status quo and its means of survival as Comparative Literature sought security and a new identity by adopting, like some long-lost relative of the west, the most expansive themes of our critical age: for example, multiculturalism and globalization translated by the west for its consumption. This exercise undertaken by the American Comparative Literature Association recurs on average every ten years, which seems to be the half‐life of each adopted topic as well as of the contemporary ability to discipline Comparative Literature under the aegis of the temporary forms of our modernity.

Our Comparative Impasse: Literature by Any Other Name?

The rhetorical call to action initiated by displacing a loss of present significance into a future that remains undefined or undefinable and thus protects hope for us as well as from us, or which invests in new ways of doing the humanities, each of these risks resembling an increasingly expansive ars combinatoria . It is as if the humanities could sustain its significance indefinitely by proposing new relations between its disciplines or by taking up cultural content that had hitherto been ignored or considered without significance. In many ways, we would like to see the validity of our modern humanities as embodying the principle of such expansiveness. Yet, this tactic comes with several dangers: first, internal dissension that pits, to use a recurring example, canonists against non-canonists (a struggle that can have no satisfactory resolution); second, it invites the criticism that the humanities are too diffuse, have little sense of disciplines or centers of knowledge, or worse, have confused the pursuit of novelty with sustainable relevance.

There is an illegitimacy to each of these dangers and outcomes, and it is as deeply conservative as it is dialectical. Each sets the stage for an impasse that can only be repeated, and I wonder if our present displacement into a future or futures, while a means of managing such an impasse, does not also set the scene for its return, but with a further weakening of the place of humanities in the future university. While merely surviving might be a satisfactory solace for such weakening, we may wonder at the same time if we have not become a participant in some kind of survival exercise within the university as it confronts the consequences of its attempt to remain relevant to the world it occupies and now obeys less and less critically.

Reconceiving the Future

Given this context, the question I want to pose as a way of bringing the foregoing observations to their conclusion and as a way of addressing the intent in the rubric that guides these seminars on the future of the humanities is the following: is the moment when we are faced with the question of our future the moment in which we should reconceive humanistic inquiry by concentrating on the discovery of new fields and areas for humanistic inquiry, or is it the moment in which the delivery of humanistic inquiry should be reconceived? To put this another way, is it not time that we put aside the hierarchical competition into which new areas of study are forced to participate? Underlying each of these two preceding questions is the conviction that no single field can or should reanimate the humanities (and have we not seen the error of this desire in the 1980s and 1990s as one approach seemed to offer salvation, only to cede its place to yet another approach?).

Is it not time that we put aside the hierarchical competition into which new areas of study are forced to participate?…Is it not time to reorganize how we present the humanities within the structure of the university?

What I want to touch on here is the confusion of means for ends, and in doing so, direct our attention to how we structure the humanities according to that confusion. In all our questioning and awareness of the conflicts that reconceiving our future brings, there is no recognition that the organization of the humanities institutionally (and their objects of study) are the locus of a profound alienation between, on the one hand, institutional demands, the internal requirements of disciplines that sustain those demands, and, on other hand, the development of means of inquiry that can only occupy the edges of the degree/discipline structures we have not stopped inheriting. I am arguing here for a way of validating a landscape that, in the case of humanities, has undergone many changes in the past fifty years but has not found a way (and has tried surprisingly infrequently and largely in peripheral ways, such as Humanities Centers) to organize these changes into programs of study that are not put into conflict with parent disciplines (and are thus not made to relive the alienation and sense of crisis that initiated theses changes in the first place). Let me put the question this way: is it not time to reorganize how we present the humanities within the structure of the university? This question comes from a suspicion that, nowadays, offering a degree with a single word or couple-of-words title no longer embodies any natural validity from the past and, above all, such a way of defining what we do is no longer replicated in the school systems that provide students to the university. Language arts for literary study, for example? Is a name like "English" too vague and already alienated from the understanding of literature and culture that animates the present (and which we have also pursued but without making it more than a contingent part of our degree programs, that is, contingent in the sense that a course on what might be called an "innovative" topic is an accessory to the core of a discipline rather than the sign that a profound change has already taken place)? Is it not time to catch up with the consequences of our present situation rather than add more examples that repeat what has already happened and thereby produce a stasis that threatens our claim to a significance different, and crucially so, to the STEM world that the university has lurched toward as the answer to the instrumentality it created when it accepted a way of doing things as a form of thought with the emphasis on form as the justification?

A Modest Proposal?

I am hesitant to prescribe a solution, since I recognize that our future is a matter of a comprehensive taking stock of the contemporary situation of the humanities. But what I would outline is the necessity of changing how we conceive of the degrees we offer, since they are the point at which we can address the fault line that affects and clouds our future. To introduce this proposal, I want to first point to a difference between how the master of arts degree is conceived in the UK and how it is conceived in the United States. In the United States, we have degree programs that largely follow our undergraduate programs, except at a higher level. In the UK, the MA program is a defined subject area; for example, in the UK one might pursue an MA in the politics and aesthetics of postcolonial literature. From this, a first proposal emerges: would our graduate programs have greater vibrancy and appeal if they were not simply an MA in "{insert any discipline’s name}" but defined themselves from the outset with respect to an identifiable subject that addresses issues within the humanities? From this, a second proposal: would a broader model reinvigorate our undergraduate degrees as each discipline identifies fields and concentrations that are organized according to a coherent body of content that also recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of so much contemporary study in the humanities? From that starting point, can we conceive of programs of study within the already existing degree/discipline structures that concentrate a broad range of ways of understanding, geographical, historical, and intellectual, rather than rely on a natural/national validity as the still final arbiter of what the humanistic inquiry means today? An irony of developing along such lines is, of course, that some of the key disciplines in the sciences and social sciences have already done so as they reorganize themselves internally—the examples of the biological sciences, engineering, and anthropology are a case in point. Each has fostered and adopted subdisciplines without losing the overarching general term. If this were acceptable, we already have the future in our hands, and it is not a matter of another paradigm that changes the content of our disciplines, but the re-forming of what we already possess, socially and historically and critically and politically, into concentrations worthy of being degree programs that give critical access to our future rather than inventions to practice, to do, and to be distracted by until they too need another rhetoric of crisis.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Essay Prize Winners Announced

We are pleased to announce the winners of the first University of Lethbridge , Global Outlook::Digital Humanities , Digital Studies/Le champ numérique   Global Digital Humanities Essay Prize .

How we determined these results

The competition received 53 entries in 7 languages, with 38 submissions in English. These were adjudicated by an international committee with competency in all submitted languages and topics.

Each essay was reviewed by two readers. In most cases, the readers of the paper included at least one native speaker of the language of submission (the exceptions were a few papers in English that were assigned to referees with strong L2 skills). The second reader too, in most cases, was also a native speaker of the language of submission.

Referees were asked to give a score of 1-5 (with 1 being the lowest score, and 5 the top) on the following three questions:

• To what extent is the abstract intellectually compelling? I.e. Is the problem or topic non-trivial? Is it well defined? Is the proposed solution or approach effective or convincing?
• To what extent is the abstract methodologically sound? I.e. does the author take an appropriate approach? propose the use of appropriate tools or arguments? use appropriate and/or convincing evidence?
• To what extent is the presentation of the abstract careful? I.e. is it clearly written? Free from typos? Appropriately structured? (Not this is not a test of artistry: many of our contestants are not writing in a second language and we should not hold them to native-speaker rhetorical style)

An additional question allowed referees to assign between 0 and 3 bonus marks for papers they thought were particularly exceptional, well suited to the goals of competition, or otherwise deserving of special attention. Submissions were then ranked on the basis of their average scores. Although mechanisms were in place for resolving cases in which the referees showed a wide divergence of opinion, there were in the end few papers on which referees’ opinions diverged markedly and none among the top four.

Although language was not considered as an adjudication criteria, the results reflect the linguistic diversity of the GO::DH community. Four of the top nine essays were in a language other than English.

The winning papers

The top essays/abstracts fall into three categories: “ First Prize ,” “ Second Prize ,” and “ Honourable Mention .”

First Prize

There were four “First Prize” winners. First Prize includes an immediate award of $200 (all amounts are in Canadian dollars) plus a further $300 upon submission of a final paper suitable for review by the editors of Digital Studies/Le champ numérique . Funding for these prizes comes from a grant provided by the University of Lethbridge. The first prize winners, listed in alphabetical order, are

• Dacos, Marin (Open Edition, France). La stratégie du Sauna finlandais: Les frontières de Digital Humanities. Essai de Géographie politique d’une communauté scientifique.
• Gawne, Lauren (University of Melbourne, Australia). Language documentation and division: Bridging the digital divide.
• Pue, A. Sean, Tracy K. Teal, and C. Titus Brown (Michigan State University, USA). Bioinformatic approaches to the computational analysis of Urdu poetic meter.
• Raval, Noopur (Jawaharlal Nehru Univesity (JNU), New Delhi, India). On Wikipedia and Failure: Notes from Queering the Encyclopedia.

Second Prize

An anonymous donation allows the committee to recognise five additional papers with a “Second Prize” of $100. While no additional funding is available for these papers, the authors are also strongly encouraged to consider developing their work further for publication in Digital Studies or other Digital Humanities journals. The second prize winners, listed in alphabetical order, are

• Arauco Dextre, Renzo (Memoragram, Lima, Peru). Memogram, un Cloud-Service Para la Memoria Colectiva.
• Carlson, Thomas A. (Princeton University, USA). Digital Maps are still not territory: Challenges raised by Syriaca.org’s Middle Eastern places over two millenia.
• Tomasini Maciel, Julia (University of Maryland, USA). Humanidades Digitales y traducción literaria: Latinoamérica entre el portugués y el español.
• Portales Machado, Yasmín Silvia (Havana, Cuba). Perfil demográfico de la blogosfera hecha en Cuba en diciembre de 2012.
• Tasovac, Toma and Natalia Ermolaev (Centre for Digital Humanities, Belgrade, Serbia). Interfacing diachrony: Rethinking lexical annotation in digital editions.

Honourable Mention

The following sixteen abstracts/essays (listed in alphabetical order) are recognised by the committee as particularly deserving of an “honourable mention.” While the committee did not have the funds available to award prizes to these papers, it nevertheless also encourages the authors of these papers to consider developing their work further for publication in Digital Studies or other Digital Humanities journals. The papers given an honorable mention, again listed in alphabetical order by first author, are

• Arbuckle, Alyssa (University of Victoria, Canada). The risk of digital repatriation for indigenous groups.
• Baryshev, Ruslan, Igor Kim, Inna Kizhner, Maxim Rumyantsev (Siberian Federal University, Russia). Digitial Humanities at Siberian Federal University.
• Calbay, Francis Raymond (HayPinas.org, Taipei, Taiwan). User-Generated vitriol: Ethnic stereotypes in online comments on media reports of a South China Sea shooting incident.
• Farman, Jason (University of Maryland, USA). Mapping virtual communities: The production of crisis maps and cultural imaginaries of the Diaspora.
• Finney, Tim (Vose Seminary, Australia). How to discover textual groups.
• Ives, Maura and Amy Earhart (Texas A&M University, USA). Establishing a digital humanities center: Vision, reality, sustainability.
• Kaltenbrunner, Wolfgang (Leiden University, The Netherlands). Transparency strategies in digital scholarship.
• López Villaneuva, José Manuel (Mexico). Reflexiones sobre la RedHD en México: desarrollo y alcance de la RedHD en la comunidad académica universitaria.
• Menon, Nirmala (Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India). Multilingual digital publishing: A postcolonial Digital Humanities imperative.
• O’Sullivan, James (Ireland). The emergence of Digital Humanities in Ireland.
• Ouellette, Jessica (University of Massachussetts, USA). Blogging borders: Transnational feminist rhetorics and global voices.
• Perozo Olivares, Karla (Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Venazuala). Una aproximación al desconocimiento de las masas digitales.
• Riedel, Dagmar (Columbia University, USA). The digitization of books in Arabic script and the digital divide in Muslim societies.
• Sandstedt, Jørgen (University of Iceland, University of Oslo, Iceland/Norway). Text-dependent automated methods in scribal hand identification.
• Schmidt, Desmond (University of Queensland, Australia). Towards a model for the digital scholarly edition.
• Sobczak, Anna (Szczecin University, Poland). A co z humanistami? – Cyfrowa humanistyka jako lekarstwo na obecny stan postrzegania humanistyki w mediach elektronicznych?

Other submissions

As the number of winners, runners up, and honorable mentions suggests, the competition was extremely strong, with only a few points separating the top from the bottom entries in each category. Several essays and abstracts not listed above also scored very close to the cut-off point or were otherwise remarked upon by the judges. We are currently gathering referees’ comments together and will be passing these on to the authors as soon as they are ready.

The adjudication committee would like to thank all who submitted abstracts or essays to this competition. The quality of the entries was extremely high and the process by which the winners were determined very difficult as a result. More than a few excellent papers had to be left off the list of named finalists.

Future competitions

Although this competition exhausts the funding received from the University of Lethbridge, we are actively seeking additional money to offer similar competitions in the future. We appreciate the patience and enthusiasm of all.

Adjudication panel

The adjudication panel consisted of the following members:

• Daniel O’Donnell (Lethbridge, AB, Canada) (Chair)
• Titi Babalola (Lethbridge, AB, Canada)
• Marcus Bingenheimer (Philadelphia, PA, USA)
• Barbara Bordalejo (Saskatoon, SK, Canada)
• Hilary Culbertson (Durham, NC, USA)
• Elie Dannaoui (Balamand, Lebanon)
• Heide Estes (Monmouth, UK)
• Domenico Fiormonte (Rome, Italy)
• Neil Fraistat (Baltimore, MD, USA)
• Alex Gil (New York)
• Elena Gonzalez-Blanco (Madrid, Spain)
• Jieh Hsiang (Taipei, Taiwan)
• Joey Jenjou Hung (Taipei, Taiwan)
• Anna Kijas (Storrs, CT, USA)
• Ernesto Priani (Mexico City)
• Gurpreet Singh (Punjab, India)
• Laurie Taylor (Gainesville, FL, USA)
• Christian Wittern (Kyoto, Japan)
• Jamie Jungmin Yoo (Cambridge, MA, USA)

Thank you very much to all adjudicators for their thoughtful work.

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4.1: Basic Essay Structure

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Essays written for an academic audience follow a structure with which you are likely familiar: Intro, Body, Conclusion. Here is a general overview of what each of those sections “does” in the larger essay.

Be aware, however, that certain assignments and certain professors may ask for additional content or require unusual formatting, so always be sure to read the assignment sheet as carefully as possible.

Introductory Section

This paragraph is the “first impression” paragraph. It needs to make an impression on the reader so that he or she becomes interested, understands your goal in the paper, and wants to read on. The intro often ends with the thesis.

• begin by drawing your reader in – offer a statement that will pique their interest in your topic
• offer some context or background information about your topic that leads you to your thesis
• conclude with the thesis

For more information about composing a strong introduction, you can visit  “How to Write an Engaging Introduction, “ by Jennifer Janechek, published on  Writing Commons,  is an excellent resource that offers specific tips and examples of compelling introduction paragraphs

Body of the Essay

• Clearly state the main point in each paragraph in the form of a  topic sentence.
• Then, support that point with evidence.
• Provide an explanation of the evidence’s significance. Highlight the way the main point shows the logical steps in the argument and link back to the claim you make in your thesis statement.

Information on how to build strong paragraphs can be found here

Many people struggle with the conclusion; not knowing how to end a paper without simply restating the paper’s thesis and main points. In fact, one of the earliest ways that we learn to write conclusions involves the “summarize and restate” method of repeating the points that you have already discussed.

While that method can be an effective way to perhaps begin a conclusion, the strongest conclusions will go beyond rehashing the key ideas from the paper. Just as the intro is the first impression, the conclusion is the last impression–and you do want your writing to make a lasting impression.

Below are some things to consider when writing your conclusion:

• what is the significance of the ideas you developed in this paper?
• how does your paper affect you, others like you, people in your community, or people in other communities?
• what must be done about this topic?
• what further research or ideas could be studied?

Jennifer Yirinic’s article, “ How to Write a Compelling Conclusion ,” which was published on  Writing Commons,  is an excellent resource that can help you to craft powerful and interesting closing paragraph.

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The Humanities in American Life: Transforming the Relationship with the Public

Depending on how you look at it, the humanities in America are either racing down a steep decline or entering a state of renewal and vitality. The challenges facing the academic humanities are well documented: university humanities departments closing their doors, students increasingly turning to other fields of study, and humanities PhD recipients competing for fewer academic jobs, with decreasing pay and benefits. At the same time, there is a deep hunger for engagement with the humanities – from the major institutions that celebrate elite culture to the confrontations in the street over how to understand the country’s history. This volume looks at the public faces of the humanities, exploring the state of the humanities today, where the academic humanities are (and should be) heading, how to build bridges to new audiences and historically marginalized communities, and in what ways the humanities help us understand urgent public concerns, such as climate change, racial justice, and public health.

Introduction

The state of the humanities circa 2022, what everyone says: public perceptions of the humanities in the media.

Using computational means to understand patterns in how the humanities are mentioned in U.S. journalism, the WhatEvery1Says project brings into focus challenging problems in the perception of the humanities. This essay reports on the project’s findings and some of the further questions that emerged from them. For example, how does the “humanities crisis” appear among the many crises of our time? Why do the humanities figure so often in connection with concrete, ordinary life yet also seem abstract in value? How can more of the substance of humanistic research be communicated as opposed to appearing as just academic business? And why is there so little focus in the media on how underrepresented populations are positioned in relation to the humanities by comparison to science and social, political, or economic issues? The essay concludes by recommending that the humanities reframe their crisis as part of larger human crises requiring multidisciplinary “grand challenge” approaches.

The Public Futures of the Humanities

The challenge of demonstrating the value of the humanities can never be fully accomplished by showing that the humanities serve other disciplines. That argument assumes the value of those other disciplines, especially STEM fields, and relegates the humanities to a secondary position whose value is, at most, instrumental. The task is to show the distinctive contribution that the humanities can make to all fields of knowledge by keeping alive values that are irreducible to both instrumentality and profitability. The public humanities stand the best chance of accomplishing this task since it not only shows what the humanities have to offer the public sphere, but how various publics are framing what the humanities do within the university. Further, the public humanities have the potential to reorient the mission of the university. One reason the humanities are underfunded is that they have the power to challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism, its market metrics and financial rationality. Universities should be more fully engaged with public art, including literary and arts events, and the public for open debate as a way of demonstrating why the public requires the humanities, and is already engaged in its practices.

Beyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

Over the past several years, scholars and critics have begun to talk about the survival of the humanities rather than its crisis. This essay traces the emergence of a rhetoric of salvation and survival in academic advocacy literature, evident in the genres, arguments, and metaphors that writers use to describe the academic humanities. Focusing, first, on a set of recent books that advocate for the humanities as a resource for deliberation, community formation, and critique, the essay then turns to the origin of the contemporary humanities in European philology as a background for the dualism of survival and crisis in narratives about the humanities. The essay concludes by arguing that we need a new framework for understanding the survival of the humanities as global humanities, in particular, one that does not emerge from a European and Christological sense of survival. Drawing upon research conducted as part of the “ World Humanities Report ,” the essay identifies some of these alternative frameworks based upon the humanities in China, South Africa, and Argentina.

Reframing the Public Humanities: The Tensions, Challenges & Potentials of a More Expansive Endeavor

This essay assesses the so-called crisis in the humanities from the vantage point of the state humanities councils, looking at the richness and increasing diversity of public humanities work happening outside the academy. The essay posits that the humanities are flourishing in a variety of public spaces, where voices outside the academy are more effectively questioning what it means to commemorate the past and build in community and meaning through that process. But even with such work thriving, the humanities face challenges. Some of those challenges are related to definitional and communications issues in and between both the academic and public sectors. Other challenges are related to access and allocation of resources. While this essay does not pretend to have “answers” to these perennial issues, it suggests that both the academy and the public might benefit from and create more lasting and relevant impact from bridge-building that marries the expertise and knowledge from both communities.

Opening the Humanities to New Fields & New Voices

This essay explores efforts to enact effective “public humanities” among humanities practitioners as the “public” in the United States is changing profoundly. In particular, it explores the creation of the Boyle Heights Museum in East Los Angeles as an attempt to bridge the gap in historical practice and outreach between an immigrant and Latino community with a team of faculty, doctoral, and undergraduate students from the University of Southern California. Building four historical exhibitions in the Boyle Heights community, this team is a reflection of the growing awareness of the need to establish new institutional practices in archiving and historical presentations that reach new immigrant communities. New PhD students are in search of approaches to historical training, publishing, and output that engage with these new publics. Our own survival in the humanities fields is increasingly dependent on reaching these publics and creating this diversity of the humanities.

Creating Knowledge with the Public: Disrupting the Expert/Audience Hierarchy

This essay provides both a philosophy and a case study to define, analyze, and explore community-centered public history practice. In its ideal form, community-centered public history practice strives for equity and inclusion. It is service-oriented. It is often future-focused. On the ground, in real time, community-centered public history practice requires constant recalibration, humility, and active collaboration that can be challenging for academically trained scholars to fully embrace. The coauthors share their experiences and impressions in order to highlight both the difficulty and the value of this work.

Grassroots Museums & the Changing Landscape of the Public Humanities

This essay is a brief history of the development of “grassroots” or community-­based museums since the 1960s. These museums pioneered new kinds of relationships with their communities that were far different from older museums and, in the process, helped fundamentally enlarge and diversify public humanities. The essay begins with a focus on three museums founded in 1967: El Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (Smithsonian) in Washington, D.C., and the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. Over the last fifty years, these museums have grown and stabilized and newer, bigger museums with similar goals have developed. These changes suggest that one future for humanities scholars is to become involved in new publics outside of the academy who are seeking humanistic analysis of their distinctive, previously marginalized, community stories.

Why Public Humanities?

This essay maps the nature, scope, and implications of the field of “public humanities” as practiced within the university. Calling for a public humanities that is collaborative, process-centered, and committed to racial and social justice, the essay considers the challenges and possibilities the new field brings to university teaching, scholarship, and administration. The author draws from her work at Brown University, her experience as the editor of a book of case studies, Doing Public Humanities , and her time as a participant-researcher at New Urban Arts, a Providence arts group, to review the organizations and resources devoted to public humanities. Describing why (and what, when, where, and how) a new humanities field began and where it stands now, the essay traces possible lessons for the humanities brought by the evolution of public humanities.

The Case for Bringing Experiential Learning into the Humanities

Drawing on innovative programs at the University of Michigan and Duke University, this essay explores an important trend in humanistic education: the provision of opportunities for experiential learning, whether for undergraduates or graduate students. Avenues for applied humanistic research, such as research-based internships and courses structured around collaborative, client-inflected research projects, provide numerous benefits. In addition to cultivating teamwork, leadership, and communications skills, such experiences build intellectual confidence, expand horizons, and foster motivation to pursue additional research challenges. Although humanistic experiments with experiential learning now abound across higher education, pedagogical conservatism among faculty has slowed the pace of change, with pilots often occurring outside the frameworks of standard curricular structures. We call on departments in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to embrace the promise of engaged, public-facing scholarly endeavor, and to make collaborative research a core feature of curricular expectations for students at all levels.

Communication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

The field of communication was added to the menu of higher education in the early part of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, it is thriving at colleges and universities throughout the United States and gaining a foothold abroad as well. This essay recounts its growth, surveys its campus manifestations, and explores the challenges it now confronts. In a world of ever-advancing technologies, of evolving forms of online interaction, and of massive amounts of misinformation and disinformation, no citizen can ignore the changing media environment. While the communication discipline can take pride in its growth, it must also heed the demands of the Old Humanities: to sort fact from fiction, to identify cultural traditions worth honoring, to question how power is arranged and whom it serves, and to help students formulate messages for a diverse and changing world. The field of communication has many challenges before it and that is a glorious thing.

Religious Studies & the Imagined Boundaries of the Humanities

Religious studies, as taught in American higher education, is in many ways a quintessential instance of the boundlessness of the humanities, since elements of religious traditions and practices are pervasive in literature, history, art, political science, philosophy, law, music, and so on. At the same time, questions about the definition of “religion,” about what constitutes legitimate “religion” protected as such by “religious freedom,” and about what privileges such “freedom” should entail affect many aspects of our lives as a nation, from the home to the workplace and to the public square. Informed and reasoned inquiry into religious traditions, texts, rituals, and practices is an essential component of civic life, on both individual and public levels. This is acutely the case in the present moment, even as religious studies faces significant challenges in the contemporary climate, both in higher education and our wider culture. We urge its protection and support into the future.

Philosophy, the Humanities & the Life of Freedom

Humanistic disciplines have family resemblances rather than a simple shared common aim or method, and, like literal family resemblances, these have an explanation that comes from their historical relationships to one another. Philosophy, in particular, is closely connected to the sciences it has spun off over the centuries, but remains distinct from them, because normative inquiry uses methods different from those of any contemporary science. But much philosophical inquiry, like much humanistic work, is also idiographic rather than nomothetic ; it focuses our attention on particular things, rather than seeking generalizations. The rewards of humanistic study are, therefore, as diverse as what we can gain from paying attention to its diverse objects of study. In ethics and political philosophy, in particular, we learn from studying particular episodes in which we discover the significance of certain values by recognizing what is wrong in societies in which they are not respected.

Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities

This essay describes the origins, growth, and transformation of the medical humanities over the past six decades, drawing on the insights of ethicists, physicians, historians, patients, activists, writers, and literature scholars who participated in building the field. The essay traces how the original idea of “humanizing physicians” evolved and how crises from death and dying, to AIDS and COVID-19, expanded humanistic inquiry into health, illness, and the human condition. It examines how a wide array of scholars, professional organizations, disciplinary approaches, academic units, and intellectual agendas came to define the vibrant field. This remarkable growth offers a counterpoint to narratives of decline in the humanities. It is a story of growing relevance shaped by tragedy, of innovative programs in medical schools and on undergraduate campuses, and vital new configurations of ethics, literature, the arts, and history that breathed new life into the study of health and medicine.

The Positive Humanities: A Focus on Human Flourishing

The Positive Humanities can be defined as the branch of learning concerned with culture in its relation to human flourishing. This new field advocates for a eudaimonic turn in the humanities, an explicit recognition of and commitment to human flourishing as a central theme of study and practical aim of the humanities. It holds that this eudaimonic turn can reconnect the humanities with their initial values and goals and provide a unifying and inspiring rationale for the humanities today, opening pathways for greater individual and collective flourishing in societies around the world. After exploring the historical roots and conceptual orientations of the Positive Humanities (which are inclusive of the arts), I present five recommendations for strengthening the focus of the humanities on human flourishing: emphasize 1) ­wisdom as much as knowledge, 2) collaboration as much as specialization, 3) the positive as much as the negative, 4) effective friction as much as increased efficiency, and 5) the flourishing of humans as much as the flourishing of the humanities.

Planetary Humanities: Straddling the Decolonial/Postcolonial Divide

This essay argues that while the science of climate change treats the Earth as one, political responses to climate change are marked profoundly by the fact that humanity can never speak as one. Questions of climate justice and sustainable human futures have deepened fractured and contested histories of modernity in which the West/non-West division intersects with emergent distinctions between postcolonial and decolonial approaches. But none of these distinctions are absolute. By discussing the works of Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, I seek to show how traditions of European and non-European thought remain entangled even as we seek, intellectually, to decolonize the world. In a connected world, the not-one-ness of humanity acts as a ground for dissension within the humanities but not for any absolute differences.

MAGDALENE COLLEGE

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Armstrong Arts and Humanities Essay Competition

2024 competition applications are closed.

The competition is open to students attending state-maintained schools in the UK, and who are in their penultimate year of education (Year 12 in England and Wales, S5 in Scotland, or Year 13 in Northern Ireland).

Essay Questions

The essay questions cover the breadth of arts and humanities subjects offered at undergraduate level at the University of Cambridge.

Questions are often multi-disciplinary, designed to encourage entries to consider the connections between various subjects, and to allow entries to approach the question from varying angles. Effective essays will present a clear argument supported by specific, relevant examples.

1. Are there some fundamental rights which legislation cannot remove?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Human, Social, and Political Sciences , and Law .

2. Is translation more like an art or more like a science?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic ; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies ; Classics ; Modern and Medieval Languages ; and Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion .

3. “It's all about feeling. If you can play 1,000 notes a minute, and it just goes straight across the board and there’s no feeling, it doesn't mean anything.” – B. B. King (blues guitarist), The Life of Riley (2012 documentary film). Discuss the role of feeling in music-making, and answer the question ‘could a robot be a good guitarist?’

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Music , and Philosophy .

4. ‘Crime does not exist. Only acts exist, acts are often given different meanings within various social frameworks.’ (Christie, 2004). Do you agree?

5. For studying literature, the selection of a canon should not only be based on quality of the texts but also on equal representation, in terms of age, gender and ethnicity, of its intended readers. Do you agree?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies ; Classics ; Education ; English ; and Modern and Medieval Languages .

6. If aliens existed, would they have a concept of God?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Philosophy , and Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion .

7. ‘As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sickened not by the crimes the wicked have committed, but by the punishments the good have inflicted’ (Oscar Wilde, 1891). How should punishments be determined?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Education ; History, and Human, Social, and Political Sciences .

8. Does the power of multi-national corporations now exceed that of the nation state?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in History; Human, Social, and Political Sciences ; and Law .

9. Why do languages change?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic ; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies ; Classics ; Linguistics ; Modern and Medieval Languages ; and Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion .

10. "We are bored when we don't know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds." (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105). Write an essay in defence of boredom using this quotation as a starting point.

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in English ; Human, Social, and Political Sciences ; Philosophy ; and Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion .

11. What can the study of sexuality in the ancient world teach us about the formation of the modern self?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Archaeology ; Classics ; English ; History ; and Human, Social, and Political Sciences .

12. "A picture is worth a thousand words". What is the place of studying texts in a world that is increasingly dependent on visual communication?

If you are interested in this question, you may wish to explore Cambridge undergraduate courses in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies ; Classics ; English ; History of Art ; Linguistics ; and Modern and Medieval Languages .

The essay questions are available to view in PDF format here:

Submissions should adhere to the word limit of 2,000 words, which does not include footnotes or bibliographies. The word count should be stated at the end of the essay.

All sources should be cited and listed in a bibliography. We understand that entrants may not have prior experience of referencing and would recommend  Harvard referencing system website  for an explanation of the Harvard referencing system. Entrants are welcome to use alternative reference styles if they prefer.

Entrants should submit one essay only. The submission must be entirely the entrant’s own work, and should not contain any work generated by ChatGPT or other forms of artificial intelligence. The competition judges are mindful of the advancements in generative AI and will disqualify any submissions which demonstrate similarities to responses produced by AI tools. Entries must not be submitted or have been submitted to an exam board as part of any coursework, extended essay, or Extended Project Qualification (EPQ), either in part or in full.

The deadline for submissions is 3 May 2024 at 18:00.

Essays should be submitted by the form at the link below.

First prize: £300 Second prize: £200 Third Prize £100.

Honourable mentions may also be awarded. Prize winners will be invited to visit Magdalene College in Summer 2024.

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If you have any questions regarding the competition, please contact Natalie Thompson, Schools Liaison Officer, by emailing [email protected] .

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Beyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

Sara Guyer is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes from 2016–2022. She is the author of Romanticism after Auschwitz (2007) and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (2015) and the editor of the book series Lit Z.

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Sara Guyer; Beyond the Survival of the Global Humanities. Daedalus 2022; 151 (3): 54–67. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01928

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Over the past several years, scholars and critics have begun to talk about the survival of the humanities rather than its crisis. This essay traces the emergence of a rhetoric of salvation and survival in academic advocacy literature, evident in the genres, arguments, and metaphors that writers use to describe the academic humanities. Focusing, first, on a set of recent books that advocate for the humanities as a resource for deliberation, community formation, and critique, the essay then turns to the origin of the contemporary humanities in European philology as a background for the dualism of survival and crisis in narratives about the humanities. The essay concludes by arguing that we need a new framework for understanding the survival of the humanities as global humanities, in particular, one that does not emerge from a European and Christological sense of survival. Drawing upon research conducted as part of the “World Humanities Report,” the essay identifies some of these alternative frameworks based upon the humanities in China, South Africa, and Argentina.

The survival of the humanities is on our minds. While for decades the humanities were ensnared in the rhetoric of crisis, our lament has recently turned to strategy, argument, and manifesto, and with this turn, implicitly and explicitly, to life and survival. Recent book titles like Sidonie Smith's A Manifesto for the Humanities and Eric Hayot's Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument . A Plan ., and collections like A New Deal for the Humanities suggest that change is afoot. Judith Butler, in her President's Address to the Modern Language Association, called this persistence , evoking a form of feminist stubbornness. 1 Further, those who continue to hold on to the crisis discourse of the humanities do so now not to indicate an event that could be overcome, but rather a condition that may be permanent, which is nowhere more clear than in Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon's Permanent Crisis . Permanent crisis is nothing if not a name for endurance and survival. But what does it mean to talk about the humanities in terms of survival? What kind of survival are we talking about? And what exactly is going to survive: where and in what form and at what critical cost?

These questions resonate throughout the World Humanities Report , a collaboration between the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences, which I have directed since 2018. The organizing questions of the report-Where do the humanities live in the world today? And what are the conditions of their flourishing?-suggest survival more than crisis. Further, the report's ground-up approach, organized around contributions from distinct national, regional, continental, and linguistic settings, has the secondary effect of reflecting survival as a global condition. In the report, the humanities appear as other than a lasting European formation and colonial/imperial project whose legacies continue to shape disciplines and institutions. Rather, the humanities are a multitudinous, vast, and uneven set of engagements with interpretation, criticism, judgment, representation, translation, preservation, voice, experience, and aesthetics that are not exhausted by European humanism and its disciplinary effects.

The report's contributors account for a wide range of institutional, disciplinary, and financial interventions, as well as policies and commitments, that will serve today and for the future. It shows further that the institutions of the humanities are modern universities on the European model as we know them, but also ngo s, museums, public humanities projects in radio and podcasts, informal “street” universities, scholarly societies, academies, summer schools, and independent research institutes. These alternative formations include the Forum on Contemporary Theory in India, a mobile winter school that includes participants from across the subcontinent; the Africa Institute, a new graduate program in the arts and humanities based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; and Les Ateliers de la Pensée, a collaboration of scholars, artists, and intellectuals focused in the francophone world working through books, a media campaign, conferences, and an intensive program for early career scholars. 2 Yet the new rhetoric of survival focuses almost exclusively on the university-based humanities: hiring faculty, maintaining levels of undergraduate enrollment, ensuring lively academic presses, and envisioning forms of collaboration and interdisciplinarity through which the humanities become embedded in all areas of the university, from ai to public health to urban studies. 3 In this sense, they raise questions of reproduction and reproducibility, of legacy, and of the difficulty of breaking from dominant legacies that include colonialism and myriad forms of institutionalized political violence. In what follows, I provide an overview of the emergence of this powerful rhetoric of survival in academic advocacy literature, before suggesting the risks of this new discourse and asking whether there are alternatives beyond crisis and survival.

In her account of the precarious state of the humanities within the university, Sidonie Smith, former president of the Modern Language Association, frames the challenge faced by the humanities in terms of “sustainability,” borrowing a framework typically used to describe the future of the planet. 4 Implicit in sustainability is that a set of collective choices and strategies, whether conceived as imaginative or sacrificial, has the power to change the lifespan of the humanities and guarantee a future. In Smith's account, the humanities will need to be reconceived in order to be durable; their (our) practices and protocols, particularly as they relate to reproduction (graduate education), will need to be reenvisioned to shift from risk of extinction to survival . The newly sustainable practices she enumerates include collaboration, flexibility, open access, innovative teaching, networking, and inclusion. What I find notable in this example is the way that a longheld attachment to crisis and near-death in accounts of the humanities (a crisis that once dominated popular, administrative, and scholarly discourse) has been subsumed by a “life drive.” If the earlier account of near-death left many to wonder whether the end already had taken place, whether our time was both that of an ever-deferred future crisis and a past event that had escaped us and for which we were constantly making amends, I want to suggest that this new attention to life in the humanities might also correlate to what Cathy Caruth has called “a different history of survival,” one less preoccupied with death and newly consumed with life. 5

Another version of this preoccupation with life is more subtle in its appearance, less about sustainable strategies and more about the very conception of the humanities and its (their, our) value. Take, for example, Amanda Anderson's Clarendon Lectures on “Psyche and Ethos,” in which life is the concept and condition through which values are established and affirmed. There, the examined or moral life becomes the vehicle for the survival of the humanities within “transdisciplinary collaborations and precisely around questions of value clarification and understanding of human experience.” 6 In other words, affirming moral life and value as an overlooked (even disparaged) priority of humanities scholarship is also the condition under which the humanities will take on a new and more sustainable life in the university and society. (This is in distinction from the humanities conceived as engaged with precarious life, the hermeneutics of suspicion, irresolution, or futurity.) For Anderson, when understood in relation to moral life , the humanities become increasingly valuable to actual sustainability: climate science, global health, good governance.

As both of these examples imply, the life or death of the humanities is almost inextricable from an analysis of the one place where we know the humanities are supposed to live: the university. 7 This analysis has been brewing over many decades, for example, in Jacques Derrida's account of the humanities in his lecture on the university without condition or Bill Readings's collection The University in Ruins . Taking Readings's understanding of ruins one step further, Chris Newfield recently asked, in the title of his article, “What Are the Humanities For?” Newfield begins his response by making abundantly clear that the place where the humanities should live-the public university-is itself already dead. As Newfield explains: “Public universities … seem not just unable but unwilling to save themselves. Given their inertia, public universities will have an easier time moving forward if they start from the idea that public universities as we knew them are dead.” 8 One wonders who is this public university that is coming into self-awareness of its own death? Is it merely the board of regents, the senior administration, the academic senate, or-insofar as it is not just a single university but the many “flagships” that he lists, in Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Chapel Hill-is this merely an impossible or fictional instance of recognition, as impossible as the dead recognizing themselves as dead?

Similarly, one wonders whether life in Newfield's account, however metaphorical, is a physical condition, a matter of motion (inertia), or biological , and whether sustainability and survival are the same as “movement.” (As if “no motion has she now, no force” describes not a child but the public university.) Newfield continues to qualify what exactly he means by death (if not salvation), describing an institution that lives on as a corpse or ghost, hollowed of the intellectual and socially transformative project at its core. He writes:

Obviously, the institutions and their activities carry on-the building mortgages, the student activities, the administrative hiring, the sports programs, and the academic labor. But their public missions do not … they no longer present themselves as forming the destiny of humanity…. The mid-twentieth-century public university, in short, is dead. 9

Newfield concludes his essay on the use (or position) of the humanities by arguing for a reversal of strategy that would amount to revitalizing and reanimating the public university, lifting it from its grave. I am less interested here in the accuracy of his account of universities (though having worked at two of the universities that appear on his list, I can say that it is not so much the abandonment of mission as it is a turn away from the humanities as the steward of that mission, a turn that can be reversed, which Newfield acknowledges) than I am in Newfield's reliance on a passage from death to life, especially to a life that is ghostly and unfulfilled.

Newfield makes five suggestions for what universities could do to salvage the humanities: three are speech acts (proclaim, admit, define), events in and through language that would also be the evidence of salvation and recovery; two are financial commitments, reinvestments in research and teaching, that also take the form of agreements. He concludes by responding to the question that provides the title of his essay: “My answer to what the humanities are for is that they are for putting mass Bildung back at the center of the postcapitalist university that is now in the early agonies of birth . The public university is dead. Long live the public university.” 10 For Newfield, the humanities are for saving the university as a public university and for reestablishing its values; the humanities remain the unit within the university that attends to these values. In other words, by saving the university, the humanities save the person, and save the people. They turn the infant into a subject and even a citizen.

But this account of a recovered and reformed university as “forming the destiny of humanity,” and of the humanities not just as forming selves or a commons but as a project of mass bildung , possesses the over/undertones of twentieth-century populist movements. The evocation of birth agony, destiny, monarchy, sovereignty, and immortality, even if only in order to issue a somewhat hyperbolic call for a public good, cannot ultimately shed its tinge of redemption, a sticky association that attaches onto this rhetoric of the humanities’ salvation and survival. To borrow from the insights of a recent “theological-political genealogy” of survival, I wonder whether the rhetoric of the survival of the humanities, for all of its strategy and pragmatism, recasts the humanities in a quasi-theological, redemptive mode at the moments when the humanities are being recognized as a public good and as valuable to the university's research mission. And, taking this further, because the humanities issue from a conception of the human and the humane with which they continue to struggle, I wonder too whether any turn to salvation and survival also hosts a history of Christianity, imperialism, and Euronationalism. If the university, saved by the humanities, stands in the place of the sovereign, especially at the moment when Newfield announces that the (public good) university is dead-and lives on-what does this mean for the global humanities? 11 Can the humanities survive in modern universities beyond their European and Christian origins? Or is the only method of overcoming their origins one that seeks not survival but a radical reconception of the humanities as global humanities?

Put more explicitly, I am asking whether the shift from crisis to survival that I have been tracing, the shift from a preoccupation with death to a preoccupation with life and living-on, cannot be extricated from a Christological account of the humanities. I am asking whether this reasserts-rather than rearranges-the descent of the humanities from a Latinate and ultimately European framework with the powers of civilization and redemption that it animates (and that animate it). In other words, the survival of the humanities is not just the survival of the humanities. It is the survival of the humanities as “human destiny,” “life beyond death,” and redemption through the university. In this logic, do we need a new concept for their survival, one that opens a global frame and resists destinal thinking?

In what follows, I would like to draw out this example even further, looking first to a somewhat traditional history of the humanities that borrows this figuration (in distinction from the more advocacy-oriented work of the literary scholars I already have introduced), then revisiting the Oxford English Dictionary ( oed ) definition of humanities (and its location), before finally considering a Chinese example in which the humanities, modeled after a European or “Western” history, are evoked as part of a nationalist project of survival. In conclusion, I ask whether there is an alternative to the crisis/survival or apocalypse/redemption framework, and what it might be.

I am following this line of thought not only in order to ask about the conditions of the humanities flourishing in a scholarly or abstract sense, but because I spend a great deal of time arguing for the importance of the humanities within the public university and the value of humanities centers and institutes as sites of possibility and collaboration. At my own University of California, Berkeley, and in national and international contexts, I insist, like Smith and Anderson, that we must think further about “what is to be done,” whether that means redesigning graduate programs or confronting “the question of the moral life more directly, without fear of sounding didactic, benighted, or insufficiently political.” 12 I also am aware that when it comes to substitutions of life for death (and death for life) that we should linger and see how the specter of life and death is overdetermined and how the rhetoric of survival draws not only from ecocriticism and allegory, but equally from ethnonationalism, theology, and the variety of administrative regimes that issue from them and that have led to multiple forms of colonial violence and the repression of Indigenous and minority knowledges. These are projects that universities and humanities scholars often have facilitated rather than resisted.

While I have been looking at Smith, Anderson, and Newfield and their inquiries at the intersection of analysis and institutional activism, even more traditional scholarly accounts of the humanities deploy a survivalist frame. Take, for example, historian James Turner's Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities . Turner's argument is that despite their disciplinary diversity-ranging from anthropology to visual culture to philosophy-the humanities, as they have come into being at least since the nineteenth century, are indebted to and entangled with the study of language and literature. Yet Turner's account of this history of the humanities registers still another version of the rhetoric of survival. In the book's introductory chapter, he describes his own contribution in this idiom: “Despite many fine monographs, no one to date has ventured an overview of … the birth of the modern humanities in the English-speaking world from the womb of philology…. This book tells that story.” 13 Here, the feminized biologization of philology as womb and the humanities as progeny, the suggestion that there is an (unacknowledged) event, following a period of gestation, that occurs in a moment that could be dated, and further the implication of infancy, growth, and, implicitly, death reflect an imagination of the humanities as a living being. More than this, Turner positions his study as having a particular role to play in the obscure birth of the humanities becoming knowable. It is only through his “venture,” his “over-view,” made possible by his fictional stance as a historian who exists outside, above, and beyond the humanities, that the birth and the proper life of the humanities become visible.

When, a few paragraphs later, Turner explicitly talks about survival, it is not the survival of the modern humanities that interests him, but of the “antiquated” practices of philology that are their predecessor, leading him to explain: “Because philology's legacy survives in the ways we build knowledge today, the excavation of the philological past becomes an effort at once of historical reconstruction and present-day self-understanding.” 14 Turner's history itself is in the mode of bildungsroman . But what of this mother-child scene and the humanities as “bless'd babe”? Is it a Kleinian moment of betrayal or a Christological moment of grace? The mother, while the hero of the tale, is also merely a womb. She ends up dead and buried, incapable of telling her own story, and in need of excavation and historical reconstruction, a project Turner enthusiastically takes up. And yet it is she, silent vessel, who is also the very condition of the reconstruction of which she is the object. 15 Just as Newfield's vision of survival rides on a logic of redemptive sovereignty, so too does this image of maternal death and recovery also make manifest a dichotomy between biologization (and the mortality it implies) and symbolization (and the immortality it invokes). The humanities, here, become merely human, and this is a story of resurrecting the mother-unless, of course, the progeny (the humanities) is Christ himself.

The origin story that Turner recovers focuses on the early (and ongoing) use of the humanities at Oxford to refer to the secular study of Latin or Latin and Greek: the classics. Turner, once again absorbing the rhetoric of institutional survival, writes:

It is telling that John Edwin Sandys's venerable History of Classical Scholarship , when it reaches the western Middle Ages, becomes no longer a history of scholarship (of critical editions, commentaries, and scholia) but of survival - of where knowledge of ancient texts persisted, of where grammar and rhetoric were still taught. 16

He goes on to refer to the relationships across time and geography in the biblical idiom of “begetting.”

Even here, in resonance with Newfield, institutional survival displaces scholarship, a move whose overdetermination indicates the high stakes of this history. While Turner is compelled by a return of philology in the humanities, his account of that return is somewhat underdetermined. That is, it misses some of the more visible recent returns of philology. While they are not strictly historical in outlook, if included, they might have shaken some of the book's more confident claims. Here, I am thinking not only of Nietzsche, whose relation to philology was ambivalent, but also the late work of Paul de Man and Edward Said, both of whom, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham points out, despite their differences of style, project, and understanding, wrote essays at the end of their lives with the title: “The Return of Philology.” 17 If, for Turner, philology is the origin of the humanities that he is at work to recover, for de Man and Said, philology already has found its way back to the humanities, whether as speculative science or as theory. Philology will not just save the humanities, rather it is, as Harpham explains, a way of naming its crisis.

In a very different history than the one we find in Turner, Harpham carefully recalls the origins of philology as the study of languages that for a brief moment served as a model for science-and appeared to be more scientific than science itself. In this context, he also recalls the deep imbrication of philology and racial (racist) theory. 18 Passing from Darwin to Gobineau to our present, Harpham argues (without reference to Turner) that we do not merely get the humanities from philology, we also get from philology the crisis of the humanities, and the response to crises outside of the humanities (crises of identity, the nation, and belonging). We get the antagonism between science (theory) and criticism, scholarly and generalist practices, complicity with racism and the resistance to racism, professionalization and skepticism of it. He argues that after the Cold War ended,

the humanities lost something of their reason for being, the legitimating crisis in which they were to have played a necessary part. Moreover, as the humanities, like other academic disciplines, became professionalized, they became insular-self-validating, self-legitimating, self-referring, self-interested. The link between the humanities and the state on the one hand and the individual on the other became attenuated. Detached from its rationale and isolated from its supporters, the humanities, conceived as a response to various crises themselves fell into crisis; and as higher education took a pragmatic, scientific turn, other sectors of the university, particularly the sciences and professional education, came to command more attention, resources, and prestige. 19

Moving from Turner's redemptive account of philology as grounding the humanities to Harpham's account of philology's unsettling and contradictory returns, we see that, whether understood as the return of science and theory or the return of pseudoscience, mere criticism, and speculation, whether framed in relation to the impossible return to (or of) a stolen homeland (Said) or the refused return of a repressed complicity (de Man), philology is not simply an empty vessel to be recovered from the ruins of the present humanities. It is a mobile signifier whose repetitions are entangled with the crisis of the humanities in a scene that the humanities are called upon to witness. In other words, the return of philology can be both central to an account of the living humanities and a source of crisis (and death). While life or death narratives surely raise the stakes of the humanities, these stakes also precede the critical and historical interventions that I have been describing. I have been suggesting that the survival of the humanities and its rhetoric does not merely replace crisis with optimism and a new framework of creative interventions. It also harbors an enduring set of risks and attachments that we cannot ignore.

This confusion of life and death is inscribed in the English definition of the humanities-and in that definition's displacement. The oed has no stand-alone entry for humanities . Instead, humanities in English remains a definition within the entry for humanity. Humanize, humanitas, humanistic - I could go on-all have their own entries, but to get at a definition of humanities , one must access it as the plural of humanity, which it is, of course, but which it also is not. Here humanities is identified as a subset of the primary definition of humanity . It is the plural of humanity defined as humane , recalling the Latin and the study of Latin letters, and suggesting that the humanities are an index not of the human understood as race or species, but rather as disposition, behavior, and character, as civilized and civilizing. It is humanity as ethos , not bios , and this suggests that ways of relating and ways of knowing are inextricably linked. The fact that there is no stand-alone entry for the humanities in the oed introduces a set of further questions about what we are talking about when we talk about survival. In this defining moment, we can see (and hear) how the humanities’ persistence-the value and persistence of methods, disciplines, or practices-do not just evoke, but are indissociable from humanity's persistence. The inclusion of the humanities within this single entry that includes collective and species identities as well as civilizational practices also evokes the long history of the humanities as a violent force within nationalist, colonial, and postcolonial networks and the reproductive force of the humanities at home and in the world. I am suggesting that recent academic narratives of the humanities’ survival, however liberal in their claims, remain burdened by logics of resurrection and redemption that are doggedly Eurocentric and Christological, leading us to question whether there can be a future for the humanities that is at once affirmative and detached from colonial violence and repression.

While I have focused until now on Europe and its legacies, particularly in U.S. academic discourse, I now want to turn to the case of China. From a philological perspective we have seen that humanities as a concept and word is untranslatable , troubling an account of the global humanities. It is also a word and concept that increasingly circulates in a globalized system of knowledge dominated by English and in the negotiation of institutional forms modeled after those in the United States and Europe. 20 At the same time, some historically European institutions today are turning to China (and by extension to the Chinese state) for institutional and financial support, rearranging the global academic order and establishing a new ecosystem for the humanities.

In China, where the fraught relationship between the humanities and human rights continues to play out, it seems that violent force was always part of the modern university's “public mission” (to use Newfield's language). As historian Wang Hui has explained, the modern Chinese university emerged with the founding in 1881 of Beiyang Naval School, which connected philology to its global project, requiring daily study of Chinese classics and English language, as well as technical courses taught in English and embedding the humanities within a military education. 21 Beiyang was the precursor of Peking University, which expanded its offerings in the humanities to include not only classics, but also literature and history, as well as sciences, law, agriculture, and the professions. Wang Hui uses this example to reflect upon the entanglement of the Chinese, American, and European university systems and identifies three stages in the recent history of the humanities in China. These include the removal of all international and scholarly standards, whereby the humanities became pure ideology, followed by the establishment of a university system that had scholarly and intellectual relevance outside of China in the mid-1990s. However, the latest developments in China suggest still another stage. The former relevance and influence of the humanities have been supplanted by a new international strategy that incorporates, rather than overcomes, violence and ideology.

In many ways, it appears as if the humanities in China are flourishing, leading to international conferences, collaborations, and commitments. They certainly have gained the attention and influence of a number of international organizations, including the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences ( cipsh ), an ngo formed in the last century to serve as the conscience of unesco in the aftermath of European fascism. cipsh is known for its publication of a massive study of The Third Reich that was designed as a platform for European intellectuals to recognize and expose the forms of political violence that led to the near destruction of Europe's Jews, and it also is one of the leading partners for the World Humanities Report . Yet because the humanities are underfunded in the United States and Europe, cipsh today is a benefactor of the contemporary Chinese state that Wang describes, and it is as much a Chinese organization as it is European. But can the humanities flourish even as censorship and repression are the norm? Can they have international resonance while ignoring political violence? Increasingly well endowed and well supported, the state-supported humanities in China have become a source of “soft power” made more powerful by the defunding of the humanities in the rest of the world. Their new stability, unlike the precarity and risk experienced in the United States, is correlated to what Wang calls a “new orthodoxy,” which also produces what he does not explicitly state: a set of distractions and justifications for ongoing abuses of freedom and human rights. I read in Wang's history of the humanities in China that the humanities-and the university-today can be made to live and apparently flourish, but they do so in a context where “inquiry without condition” is foreclosed. The history that he tells reminds us that the Chinese university today is, despite its explicit commitments to the humanities, as it was at its outset, a project “with military, industrial, and political motivations … the product of ‘national salvation and survival.’“ 22 The place in the world where the humanities are most apparently alive and most robustly supported is also where they have been left for dead. The life drive here is a cipher and a veil.

I would like to conclude not by outlining a set of new strategies or fashioning a new polemic, but by asking, in light of the account I have provided, whether there are-whether there could be-nonredemptive, nonapocalyptic strategies for the humanities. Can we break from these dramas of life and death and the violences that they permit? Or can we only become increasingly aware of them and commit to reworking them and sustaining the humanities in this way? 23

Returning to Sidonie Smith's Manifesto , where I take sustainability as another example of the new life drive in the discourse surrounding the humanities, I also find in its somewhat modest and deeply pragmatic tone (that is, this is not mass bildung or even moral life, but mere sustainability in what she calls, after D. W. Winnicott, “good enough times”) the seed of possibility. First, the way that Smith understands sustainability is, surprisingly, as a form of nonreproduction. Similarly, many arguments about sustainability in an environmental idiom also focus on the nonreproduction of our practices and institutions. This logic, whereby the future is dissociated from reproduction, evokes, even as it differs from, arguments like those Lee Edelman laid out in No Future . Even more recently, in an essay on queer philology, Daniel Link asks another version of these questions: “But how to teach, how to develop a non-reproductive or non-reproductivist pedagogy that recovers the power of transformation that the humanities once had, without being confined to the cabinet of useless curiosities?” 24

Yet for all of our efforts at preservation, nonreproduction is also one of the significant methods of the humanities. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age , historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, stakes out a new set of scholarly alliances and practices to reflect on his own version of non-self-reproduction and his break from postcolonial theory. He explains: “The fact of the planet … coming into view in the everyday lives of humans leads us to question whether the relationship of mutuality between humans and the earth/world that many twentieth-century thinkers inherited, assumed, and celebrated has become untenable today.” He goes on to ask: “How do we move, in the face of the current ecological crisis, toward composing a new ‘commons,’ a new anthropology, as it were, in search of a redefinition of human relationships to the nonhuman, including the planet?” 25 Even more radically, and somewhat perversely, Claire Colebrook, in a bleak account of human extinction, suggests that nonreproduction means the artifacts of the humanities will remain without anyone to read them: “the earth's strata will be inscribed with scars of the human capacity to create radical and volatile climactic changes.” Because there will be no one left to read, she is left to ask, “how do we account for the fossil records or archives borne by the stone?” 26 And, returning to the genealogy of survival that I mentioned earlier, Adam Stern leaves us at the end of the book with the same question with which he began-”Who is speaking of survival?”-a question that he proposes to answer by inventing a new, imaginary figure of scholarly perseverance. 27 The questions in each of these texts, by Link, Chakrabarty, Colebrook, and Stern-which also belong to distinct traditions in the humanities (Latin American studies, postcolonial history, critical theory, and religious studies)-and the alternate futures and practices they anticipate suggest a path that might be neither a life drive nor an apocalyptic collapse, even as they each are fully engaged with the histories and theories of life and survival. And all of this leads me to ask whether it is the question itself, “inquiry without condition,” and the other questions to which we have looked - Can we loosen our grip on survival? Can we let go of life? What would this look like? - that will enable the humanities to persist, persevere, endure.

I am convinced that these are not merely rhetorical questions, nor strictly theoretical ones. They are the same questions that almost every academic humanities department in a U.S. university asks as hiring season comes around. At that moment, the question inevitably surfaces of whether to replace faculty who have retired with those in the same fields, or to create spaces for new fields and new voices, often in interdisciplinary, emergent, or historically under-recognized areas of research and teaching. Do these new voices have a place in the university if it means having to give up areas of study that it seems always belonged there and thus always should belong? Is nonreproduction a form of risk or a form of survival? Can it be both? These questions and strategies of differentiation give us some sense that there can be nonreproductive substitutions. So too do the emerging sites of the humanities with which I began-mobile, adjacent, temporary, instrumentalist, and activist-reveal how collaborations within and beyond the university, even as they appear to be acts of abandonment, are also instances of survival. These ongoing negotiations, which cut across the boundaries and disciplines that we know, are and will be worked out in time.

Judith Butler, “Stumbling, Errancy, Persistence: The Struggle for the Humanities,” The Presidential Address, MLA Convention 2021, January 8, 2021. See also Amy B. Wang, “‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’ Becomes New Battle Cry after McConnell Silences Elizabeth Warren,” The Washington Post , February 8, 2017.

See Forum on Contemporary Theory, a Member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, https://fctworld.org ; The Africa Institute, https://theafricainstitute.org ; and les Ateliers de la Pensée, https://www.lesateliersdelapensee.org .

At my own university, three examples come immediately to mind: the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public; the establishment of the new College for Computing, Data Science, and Society, which includes society as part of its mission; and the multiyear program “The Art of Writing,” designed to integrate writing as an art of persuasion and inquiry into courses across the campus, and not only in the arts and humanities.

Sidonie Smith, “Manifesto for a Sustainable Humanities,” in Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 108.

Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 17.

Amanda Anderson, Psyche andEthos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 13.

The Humanities Indicators and the National Endowment for the Humanities have made a point of identifying the place of the humanities in American life, but that realm of inquiry will await another occasion.

Christopher Newfield, “What Are the Humanities For? Rebuilding the Public University,” in A New Deal for the Humanities , ed. Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 160.

My emphasis. Ibid., 176.

On a somewhat different topic, Smith in her recovery of the humanities turns not to a set of speech acts and the monarchy but to the workers, evoking Lenin in a chapter she calls “What Is to Be Done?” See Smith, Manifesto for the Humanities .

Anderson, Psyche and Ethos , 104.

James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Humanities (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), xiii.

My emphasis. Ibid., 185.

My thinking here is indebted to a set of analyses of mothers and poetry, including those by Cathy Caruth and Barbara Johnson. See Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

My emphasis. Turner, Philology , 25.

See Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Edward Said, “The Return to Philology,” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).

I am here glossing over a history of literature and science that Amanda Jo Goldstein more completely tells. See Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America , 189.

See Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables , ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).

See Wang Hui, “The Humanities in China: History and Challenges,” History of the Humanities 5 (2) (2020): 309–331.

Ibid., 314.

See Ralph Hexter, with Craig Buckwald, “Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and Fate: The Ethics of Reading and the University Administrator,” in The Humanities and Public Life , ed. Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

Daniel Link, “Why Should We Be So Humanistic?” in World Humanities Report (forthcoming).

Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), 19–20.

Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays in Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 23.

See Adam Stern, Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

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Essay  COMPETITION

2024 global essay prize, registrations are now open all essayists must register  here  before friday 31 may, 2024.

The John Locke Institute encourages young people to cultivate the characteristics that turn good students into great writers: independent thought, depth of knowledge, clear reasoning, critical analysis and persuasive style. Our Essay Competition invites students to explore a wide range of challenging and interesting questions beyond the confines of the school curriculum.

Entering an essay in our competition can build knowledge, and refine skills of argumentation. It also gives students the chance to have their work assessed by experts. All of our essay prizes are judged by a panel of senior academics drawn from leading universities including Oxford and Princeton, under the leadership of the Chairman of Examiners, former Cambridge philosopher, Dr Jamie Whyte.

The judges will choose their favourite essay from each of seven subject categories - Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology and Law - and then select the winner of the Grand Prize for the best entry in any subject. There is also a separate prize awarded for the best essay in the junior category, for under 15s.

Q1. Do we have any good reasons to trust our moral intuition?

Q2. Do girls have a (moral) right to compete in sporting contests that exclude boys?

Q3. Should I be held responsible for what I believe?

Q1. Is there such a thing as too much democracy?

Q2. Is peace in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip possible?

Q3. When is compliance complicity?

Q1. What is the optimal global population?  

Q2. Accurate news reporting is a public good. Does it follow that news agencies should be funded from taxation?

Q3. Do successful business people benefit others when making their money, when spending it, both, or neither?

Q1. Why was sustained economic growth so rare before the later 18th century and why did this change?

Q2. Has music ever significantly changed the course of history?

Q3. Why do civilisations collapse? Is our civilisation in danger?

Q1. When, if ever, should a company be permitted to refuse to do business with a person because of that person’s public statements?

Q2. In the last five years British police have arrested several thousand people for things they posted on social media. Is the UK becoming a police state?

Q3. Your parents say that 11pm is your bedtime. But they don’t punish you if you don’t go to bed by 11pm. Is 11pm really your bedtime?

Q1. According to a study by researchers at four British universities, for each 15-point increase in IQ, the likelihood of getting married increases by around 35% for a man but decreases by around 58% for a woman. Why?

In the original version of this question we misstated a statistic. This was caused by reproducing an error that appeared in several media summaries of the study. We are grateful to one of our contestants, Xinyi Zhang, who helped us to see (with humility and courtesy) why we should take more care to check our sources. We corrected the text on 4 April. Happily, the correction does not in any way alter the thrust of the question.

Q2. There is an unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety among young people. Can we fix this? How?

Q3. What is the difference between a psychiatric illness and a character flaw?

Q1. “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” What could the speaker mean by “spiritual”?

Q2. Is it reasonable to thank God for protection from some natural harm if He is responsible for causing the harm?

Q3. Does God reward those who believe in him? If so, why?

JUNIOR prize

Q1. Does winning a free and fair election automatically confer a mandate for governing?

Q2. Has the anti-racism movement reduced racism?

Q3. Is there life after death?

Q4. How did it happen that governments came to own and run most high schools, while leaving food production to private enterprise? 

Q5. When will advancing technology make most of us unemployable? What should we do about this?

Q6. Should we trust fourteen-year-olds to make decisions about their own bodies? 

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS & FURTHER DETAILS

Please read the following carefully.

Entry to the John Locke Institute Essay Competition 2024 is open to students from any country.

Registration  

Only candidates who registered before the registration deadline of Friday, 31 May 2024 may enter this year's competition. To register, click here .  

All entries must be submitted by 11.59 pm BST on  the submission deadline: Sunday, 30 June 2024 .  Candidates must be eighteen years old, or younger, on that date. (Candidates for the Junior Prize must be fourteen years old, or younger, on that date.)

Entry is free.

Each essay must address only one of the questions in your chosen subject category, and must not exceed 2000 words (not counting diagrams, tables of data, endnotes, bibliography or authorship declaration). 

The filename of your pdf must be in this format: FirstName-LastName-Category-QuestionNumber.pdf; so, for instance, Alexander Popham would submit his answer to question 2 in the Psychology category with the following file name:

Alexander-Popham-Psychology-2.pdf

Essays with filenames which are not in this format will be rejected.

The candidate's name should NOT appear within the document itself. 

Candidates should NOT add footnotes. They may, however, add endnotes and/or a Bibliography that is clearly titled as such.

Each candidate will be required to provide the email address of an academic referee who is familiar with the candidate's written academic work. This should be a school teacher, if possible, or another responsible adult who is not a relation of the candidate. The John Locke Institute will email referees to verify that the essays submitted are indeed the original work of the candidates.

Submissions may be made as soon as registration opens in April. We recommend that you submit your essay well in advance of th e deadline to avoid any last-minute complications.

Acceptance of your essay depends on your granting us permission to use your data for the purposes of receiving and processing your entry as well as communicating with you about the Awards Ceremony Dinner, the academic conference, and other events and programmes of the John Locke Institute and its associated entities.  

Late entries

If for any reason you miss the 30 June deadline you will have an opportunity to make a late entry, under two conditions:

a) A late entry fee of 20.00 USD must be paid by credit card within twenty-four hours of the original deadline; and

b) Your essay must be submitted  before 11.59 pm BST on Wednesday, 10 July 2024.

To pay for late entry, a registrant need only log into his or her account, select the relevant option and provide the requested payment information.

Our grading system is proprietary. Essayists may be asked to discuss their entry with a member of the John Locke Institute’s faculty. We use various means to identify plagiarism, contract cheating, the use of AI and other forms of fraud . Our determinations in all such matters are final.

Essays will be judged on knowledge and understanding of the relevant material, the competent use of evidence, quality of argumentation, originality, structure, writing style and persuasive force. The very best essays are likely to be those which would be capable of changing somebody's mind. Essays which ignore or fail to address the strongest objections and counter-arguments are unlikely to be successful .

Candidates are advised to answer the question as precisely and directly as possible.

The writers of the best essays will receive a commendation and be shortlisted for a prize. Writers of shortlisted essays will be notified by 11.59 pm BST on Wednesday, 31 July. They will also be invited to London for an invitation-only academic conference and awards dinner in September, where the prize-winners will be announced. Unlike the competition itself, the academic conference and awards dinner are not free. Please be aware that n obody is required to attend either the academic conference or the prize ceremony. You can win a prize without travelling to London.

All short-listed candidates, including prize-winners, will be able to download eCertificates that acknowledge their achievement. If you win First, Second or Third Prize, and you travel to London for the ceremony, you will receive a signed certificate. 

There is a prize for the best essay in each category. The prize for each winner of a subject category, and the winner of the Junior category, is a scholarship worth US$2000 towards the cost of attending any John Locke Institute programme, and the essays will be published on the Institute's website. Prize-giving ceremonies will take place in London, at which winners and runners-up will be able to meet some of the judges and other faculty members of the John Locke Institute. Family, friends, and teachers are also welcome.

The candidate who submits the best essay overall will be awarded an honorary John Locke Institute Junior Fellowship, which comes with a US$10,000 scholarship to attend one or more of our summer schools and/or visiting scholars programmes. 

The judges' decisions are final, and no correspondence will be entered into.

R egistration opens: 1 April, 2024.

Registration deadline: 31 May, 2024. (Registration is required by this date for subsequent submission.)

Submission deadline: 30 June, 2024.

Late entry deadline: 10 July, 2024. (Late entries are subject to a 20.00 USD charge, payable by 1 July.)

Notification of short-listed essayists: 31 July, 2024.

Academic conference: 20 - 22 September, 2024.

Awards dinner: 21 September, 2024.

Any queries regarding the essay competition should be sent to [email protected] . Please be aware that, due to the large volume of correspondence we receive, we cannot guarantee to answer every query. In particular, regrettably, we are unable to respond to questions whose answers can be found on our website.

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The John Locke Institute's Global Essay Prize is acknowledged as the world's most prestigious essay competition. 

We welcome tens of thousands of submissions from ambitious students in more than 150 countries, and our examiners - including distinguished philosophers, political scientists, economists, historians, psychologists, theologians, and legal scholars - read and carefully assess every entry. 

I encourage you to register for this competition, not only for the hope of winning a prize or commendation, and not only for the chance to join the very best contestants at our academic conference and gala ceremony in London, but equally for the opportunity to engage in the serious scholarly enterprise of researching, reflecting on, writing about, and editing an answer to one of the important and provocative questions in this year's Global Essay Prize. 

We believe that the skills you will acquire in the process will make you a better thinker and a more effective advocate for the ideas that matter most to you.

I hope to see you in September!

Best wishes,

Jamie Whyte, Ph.D. (C ANTAB ) 

Chairman of Examiners

Q. I missed the registration deadline. May I still register or submit an essay?

A. No. Only candidates who registered before 31 May will be able to submit an essay. 

Q. Are footnote s, endnotes, a bibliography or references counted towards the word limit?

A. No. Only the body of the essay is counted. 

Q. Are in-text citations counted towards the word limit? ​

A. If you are using an in-text based referencing format, such as APA, your in-text citations are included in the word limit.

Q. Is it necessary to include foo tnotes or endnotes in an essay? ​

A. You  may not  include footnotes, but you may include in-text citations or endnotes. You should give your sources of any factual claims you make, and you should ackn owledge any other authors on whom you rely.​

Q. I am interested in a question that seems ambiguous. How should I interpret it?

A. You may interpret a question as you deem appropriate, clarifying your interpretation if necessary. Having done so, you must answer the question as directly as possible.

Q. How strict are  the age eligibility criteria?

A. Only students whose nineteenth birthday falls after 30 June 2024 will be eligible for a prize or a commendation. In the case of the Junior category, only students whose fifteenth birthday falls after 30 June 2024 will be eligible for a prize or a commendation. 

Q. May I submit more than one essay?

A. Yes, you may submit as many essays as you please in any or all categories.

Q. If I am eligible to compete in the Junior category, may I also (or instead) compete in another category?

A. Yes, you may.

Q. May I team up with someone else to write an essay?  

A. No. Each submitted essay must be entirely the work of a single individual.

Q. May I use AI, such as ChatGPT or the like, in writing my essay?

A. All essays will be checked for the use of AI. If we find that any content is generated by AI, your essay will be disqualified. We will also ask you, upon submission of your essay, whether you used AI for  any  purpose related to the writing of your essay, and if so, you will be required to provide details. In that case, if, in our judgement, you have not provided full and accurate details of your use of AI, your essay will be disqualified. 

Since any use of AI (that does not result in disqualification) can only negatively affect our assessment of your work relative to that of work that is done without using AI, your safest course of action is simply not to use it at all. If, however, you choose to use it for any purpose, we reserve the right to make relevant judgements on a case-by-case basis and we will not enter into any correspondence. 

Q. May I have someone else edit, or otherwise help me with, my essay?

A. You may of course discuss your essay with others, and it is perfectly acceptable for them to offer general advice and point out errors or weaknesses in your writing or content, leaving you to address them.

However, no part of your essay may be written by anyone else. This means that you must edit your own work and that while a proofreader may point out errors, you as the essayist must be the one to correct them. 

Q. Do I have to attend the awards ceremony to win a prize? ​

A. Nobody is required to attend the prize ceremony. You can win a prize without travelling to London. But if we invite you to London it is because your essay was good enough - in the opinion of the First Round judges - to be at least a contender for First, Second or Third Prize. Normally the Second Round judges will agree that the short-listed essays are worth at least a commendation.

Q. Is there an entry fee?

A. No. There is no charge to enter our global essay competition unless you submit your essay after the normal deadline, in which case there is a fee of 20.00 USD .

Q. Can I receive a certificate for my participation in your essay competition if I wasn't shortlisted? 

A. No. Certificates are awarded only for shortlisted essays. Short-listed contestants who attend the award ceremony in London will receive a paper certificate. If you cannot travel to London, you will be able to download your eCertificate.

Q. Can I receive feedba ck on my essay? 

A. We would love to be able to give individual feedback on essays but, unfortunately, we receive too many entries to be able to comment on particular essays.

Q. The deadline for publishing the names of short-listed essayists has passed but I did not receive an email to tell me whether I was short-listed.

A. Log into your account and check "Shortlist Status" for (each of) your essay(s).

Q. Why isn't the awards ceremony in Oxford this year?

A. Last year, many shortlisted finalists who applied to join our invitation-only academic conference missed the opportunity because of capacity constraints at Oxford's largest venues. This year, the conference will be held in central London and the gala awards dinner will take place in an iconic London ballroom. 

TECHNICAL FAQ s

Q. The system will not accept my essay. I have checked the filename and it has the correct format. What should I do?  

A. You have almost certainly added a space before or after one of your names in your profile. Edit it accordingly and try to submit again.

Q. The profile page shows my birth date to be wrong by a day, even after I edit it. What should I do?

A. Ignore it. The date that you typed has been correctly input to our database. ​ ​

Q. How can I be sure that my registration for the essay competition was successful? Will I receive a confirmation email?

A. You will not receive a confirmation email. Rather, you can at any time log in to the account that you created and see that your registration details are present and correct.

TROUBLESHOOTING YOUR SUBMISSION

If you are unable to submit your essay to the John Locke Institute’s global essay competition, your problem is almost certainly one of the following.

If so, please proceed as indicated.

1) PROBLEM: I receive the ‘registrations are now closed’ message when I enter my email and verification code. SOLUTION. You did not register for the essay competition and create your account. If you think you did, you probably only provided us with your email to receive updates from us about the competition or otherwise. You may not enter the competition this year.

2) PROBLEM I do not receive a login code after I enter my email to enter my account. SOLUTION. Enter your email address again, checking that you do so correctly. If this fails, restart your browser using an incognito window; clear your cache, and try again. Wait for a few minutes for the code. If this still fails, restart your machine and try one more time. If this still fails, send an email to [email protected] with “No verification code – [your name]” in the subject line.

SUBMITTING AN ESSAY

3) PROBLEM: The filename of my essay is in the correct format but it is rejected. SOLUTION: Use “Edit Profile” to check that you did not add a space before or after either of your names. If you did, delete it. Whether you did or did not, try again to submit your essay. If submission fails again, email [email protected] with “Filename format – [your name]” in the subject line.

4) PROBLEM: When trying to view my submitted essay, a .txt file is downloaded – not the .pdf file that I submitted. SOLUTION: Delete the essay. Logout of your account; log back in, and resubmit. If resubmission fails, email [email protected] with “File extension problem – [your name]” in the subject line.

5) PROBLEM: When I try to submit, the submission form just reloads without giving me an error message. SOLUTION. Log out of your account. Open a new browser; clear the cache; log back in, and resubmit. If resubmission fails, email [email protected] with “Submission form problem – [your name]” in the subject line.

6) PROBLEM: I receive an “Unexpected Error” when trying to submit. SOLUTION. Logout of your account; log back in, and resubmit. If this resubmission fails, email [email protected] with “Unexpected error – [your name]” in thesubject line. Your email must tell us e xactly where in the submission process you received this error.

7) PROBLEM: I have a problem with submitting and it is not addressed above on this list. SOLUTION: Restart your machine. Clear your browser’s cache. Try to submit again. If this fails, email [email protected] with “Unlisted problem – [your name]” in the subject line. Your email must tell us exactly the nature of your problem with relevant screen caps.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU EMAIL US.

Do not email us before you have tried the specified solutions to your problem.

Do not email us more than once about a single problem. We will respond to your email within 72 hours. Only if you have not heard from us in that time may you contact us again to ask for an update.

If you email us regarding a problem, you must include relevant screen-shots and information on both your operating system and your browser. You must also declare that you have tried the solutions presented above and had a good connection to the internet when you did so.

If you have tried the relevant solution to your problem outlined above, have emailed us, and are still unable to submit before the 30 June deadline on account of any fault of the John Locke Institute or our systems, please do not worry: we will have a way to accept your essay in that case. However, if there is no fault on our side, we will not accept your essay if it is not submitted on time – whatever your reason: we will not make exceptions for IT issues for which we are not responsible.

We reserve the right to disqualify the entries of essayists who do not follow all provided instructions, including those concerning technical matters.