Humanities Center Finds New Vigor

For Homi K. Bhabha and Steven H. Biel, it was a move down the hall. But when this team left the History and Literature department to take the helm of the Humanities Center next door in the Barker Center, they created the potential for more meaningful interdisciplinary work at Harvard.

Founded in 1984 as a more specialized Center for Literary Studies, the Humanities Center has since widened its scope and is now a place for faculty from different departments to collaborate in seminars, conferences, and lecture series.

The Center holds more than 30 seminars over the course of each year on topics ranging from “The History of the Book” to “Philosophy, Poetry, and Religion.” While most of the seminars offered in past years centered on humanities subjects, the arrival of Bhabha, its new director, and Biel, could signal further broadening of the Center’s focus.

“We’re hoping to take the Humanities Center and make it the crossroads of our campus, raising important humanities issues across divisions and schools,” said Bhabha, sitting in his new office in the Barker Center yesterday afternoon.

“He has big plans,” said Biel, who is working under Bhabha as the executive director of the Center and also serves as the director of undergraduate studies in History and Literature. “I’m going to be working with Homi...to try to get as many things going as soon as we reasonably can.”

An example of The Center’s new ties to other disciplines on campus, the upcoming “Two Cultures” seminar is a collaboration between the Humanities Center and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

“The more advanced research you have in the sciences, the more the humanities are called upon to address important issues,” said Bhabha, who until this year served as chair of the History and Literature department. “There are questions of religion, questions of ethics, questions of aesthetics. All of these issues become extremely important in thinking through major scientific problems.”

The stem cell seminar will include Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, who is a member of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics.

“Homi Bhabha brings to the Humanities Center...a keen eye for cultural and political questions that spill across academic disciplines,” Sandel said. “His bold and generous vision of the humanities is sure to attract colleagues from across the University into lively and unexpected intellectual engagements.”

The Center hopes to attract “people who aren’t necessarily humanists,” said Biel, who will move to the Center full-time next year.

The Center is also planning a series on terrorism and an event on Hurricane Katrina that will bring humanists together with historians, journalists, and public health experts.

FINDING THEIR PLACE

Bhabha takes over at the Center amidst a larger examination into the role of interdisciplinary study at Harvard. Some Harvard College Curricular Review committees have recommended that the College increase campus opportunities for interdisciplinary work.

Bhabha said the Center has given informal input to the review, whose recommendations will likely take a few years to implement fully.

A more immediate goal for The Center is to expand its audience.

“A lot of what goes on in the Humanities Center is really oriented towards graduate students and faculty, by the nature of the events themselves,” Biel said. “I think one of the greatest potential untapped audiences for Humanities Center events is the undergraduate population.”

He added that the center has planned more events designed to appeal to an undergraduate audience as well as to the Cambridge and Boston communities.

This expansion in programming necessitates a financial boost. Bhabha and Biel said they will need to step up fundraising efforts, even though the Mellon Foundation, the office of University President Lawrence H. Summers, the provost’s office, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have already provided financial support.

In a statement last June, Summers acknowledged his financial and ideological commitments “to help[ing] the

center engage with such cross-cutting issues even as it strengthens its critical role within FAS.”