Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

About the Center

Underlying Premise

The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere was established with the premise that cultural work is in the public interest and requires the active partnership of the humanities and the community in the making of culture. The Center’s activities thus derive from a national agenda regarding the civic responsibilities of the humanities. Lee Bollinger has described 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 must take seriously their cultural work with the community.

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 entails disciplinary and interdisciplinary work in the humanities, along with collaborative activities with other disciplines and professional schools of the University.

General Objectives

Knowledge in universities has been divided historically into production and transmission. While that division could be seen as forming the dual mission of universities, research and teaching, it is 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 circulated scribal reports and letters to books and journals. Most recently this transmission has also taken place by means of contemporary telecommunications systems and the worldwide web. All are media 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 in the United States 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 aspects should be fostered. The Center thus supports workshops, seminars, and conferences as typical and significant examples of this type of productive exchange. Other versions of collaboration, however, are now developing in various areas of universities and the humanities: in the future, the Center will look into various applications of the laboratory model and the web as a place for collaborative research and writing in the humanities.

Origins

In 1999, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) began exploring the possibility of establishing a center for the humanities at the University of Florida. The Humanities Council, 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 of CLAS and Research & Graduate Programs (RGP) supplying important seed money, the Humanities Council established a task force with three major responsibilities for the first several years to: (1) research and consider the mission, structure, and programs of what would become the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, (2) create the structure and the programs of the center, and (3) seek additional funds for that programming.

During the early stages of its development, the Center’s task force (Shelly Isenberg, Robert D’Amico, Fitz Brundage, and John Leavey) organized a series of lectures by leading scholars on the state and future of the humanities. These included: John D’Arms (former Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Michigan and then President of the American Council of Learned Societies), Robert Connor (Director of the National Humanities Center), Sander Gilman (then the newly appointed head of the Humanities Lab at the University of Illinois-Chicago), and John Guillory (New York University). The immediate objective of their presentations was to stimulate broad conversations about the humanities. Their input also allowed the planning committee to formulate, not only institutionally but also intellectually, the future scope and purpose of the Center. These speakers and Keith Baker (then Director of the Stanford University Humanities Center) served as consultants regarding the structures and work of the nascent Center.

Early Programs

Early Programs In Spring 2001, the Humanities Council began sponsoring term lectures by prominent scholars. The selected scholar was in residence approximately two weeks and gave two to three public lectures and other seminars. The inaugural Term Lecturer was Jacques Derrida, followed by Jerry Fodor, and Elaine Pagels. In subsequent years, the Council continued to organize and support annual lectures and readings at the behest of the various humanities departments on topics of interest to the university community. This tradition laid the groundwork for the future Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. In 2001-2002, the planning committee also implemented an experimental seminar with the goal of exploring the structures and research that the Humanities Center would support in the future and initiating planning for its first several years.

Recent History

In the years since 2001, the Center has sponsored an extensive program of collaborative activities (seminars, symposia, research groups, and lecture series) funded by the College, Research and Graduate Programs, endowment funds, and the humanities departments. With the generous support of the Rothman Endowment and Yavitz Fund, the activities of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere have expanded significantly since September 2009. For information about previously supported conferences, symposia, and distinguished speakers, please click here.