About the Center
Brief History
In 1999 the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences began exploring the possibility of establishing a center for the humanities at the University of Florida. The Humanities Council, which is composed of the chairs of the humanities departments and programs, studied structures of a number of institutions and started to plan for activities over the next three years. In 2000, with the Dean's office and Research & Graduate Programs (RGP) supplying important seed funding, the Humanities Council established a task force with three major responsibilities for the first several years: (1) to research and consider the mission, structure, and programs of a center for the humanities, tentatively to be called Center for the Humanities and the Public sphere, (2) to create the structure and the programs of the center, and (3) to seek additional funds for that programming.
Mission of the Center
The Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere has two interrelated purposes: to provide an intellectual space and a physical location within the University and College for critical and collaborative discussions of the humanities that reach across and beyond specializations; and to provide a place for outreach to the community in which we live and teach.
The Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere takes seriously that cultural work is in the public interest and requires the active partnership of the humanities and the community in the making of culture. Over the next several years the Center’s activities derive from a national agenda regarding the civic responsibilities of the humanities. Lee Bollinger describes this agenda precisely:
Culture seems intangible, but its force can make a profound difference in communities where history, language, performance, ethics, imagination, and a sense of place are valued. From the forms and stories of our world, new kinds of citizenship arise. University and community partners who take these realities seriously are the agents of a healthy democracy. For these reasons, we believe that cultural work in the public interest should be at the heart of American higher education and public life.
In other words, the humanities make a difference in the comprehension of the complexities of contemporary existence and should take seriously their cultural work with the community.
In order to bring about a productive public partnership, the humanities must underscore how history, language, imagination, ethics, and a sense of place, for example, are foundational to our understanding of ourselves and the world. This collaboration would entail disciplinary and interdisciplinary work in the humanities, with other disciplines and professional schools of the university.
Programs and Activities
Knowledge in the university has been divided into production and transmission. While that division could be seen as forming the dual mission of the university, research and teaching, it is more fundamentally the structure of academic research itself. The exchange of research among scholars is a basic complement to the production of knowledge, and such exchange has historically taken varied forms from scribal reports and letters circulated among interested parties to books and journals to contemporary telecommunications systems and the current worldwide web.
Present-day forms include the face-to-face contact of seminars and conferences, or the distant contact of the video conference—all means by which individuals meet to exchange the latest research, summarize the strongest developments of the last several decades, and enunciate a possible agenda for future research. Although collaborative research has become a strong model for research in the sciences (the structure and space of the laboratory), the humanities still work more closely from a model of the individual researcher within a community of scholars. Therefore, exchange in the humanities has stressed less the collaborative implications of research than its production values: the book, the essay, the article, for instance. Nonetheless, the transmission of knowledge is a crucial element of humanistic research, and its collaborative aspect generally concerns transmission. The conference and the seminar are typical and significant examples of this exchange. Other versions of collaboration, however, are now developing in various areas of the university and the humanities: the web as a place for collaborative writing and the research group as the lab structure in the humanities.
University of Florida - University Senate
Arts & Humanities Working Group - Preliminary Report (April 2006)
AAU Report for the Humanities
AAU Report
Recommendations for the Humanities. (PDF)
Dr Robert A. Hatch
Interim Director
Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere
ufhatch@ufl.edu