Masters’ School Seminar 31.05.2023 3 p.m

The Masters’ School Seminar will be held on May, 31, at  3 p.m.

Our guest is Prof. Graham Huggan.

Prof. Graham Huggan teaches at the University of Leeds (UK), where his research spans three cross-disciplinary fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and environmental humanities. These fields are brought together in his most recently published monograph, Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet (Bloomsbury, 2018). Much of his current time is spent facilitating the work of early-career researchers and postgraduate students, for example, in a Leverhulme-funded doctoral training program in extinction studies, or a recently completed international collaborative research project on transboundary European national parks.

Title and abstract:

Crisis, what crisis? Interdisciplinarity and the future of the humanities

Debates surrounding the so-called crisis of the humanities have long since come to acquire a familiar ring to them. This isn’t to say that the humanities are not in crisis (declining student numbers, public perceptions that humanities research is of limited relevance, etc.), but that crisis can be interpreted and acted upon in different ways. In this talk, I argue that crisis is best seen as a turning point that encourages new forms of thinking: about what the humanities are, what they can do, and how they might reinvent themselves in order to meet some of the global challenges of our times. Interdisciplinarity, though the debates surrounding it are in many ways as familiar as those surrounding the crisis of the humanities, is potentially part of that new thinking, emerging in – inter alia – the various “new humanities” clusters as well as renewed calls to bridge the artificially constructed arts and sciences divide. Needless to say, not all humanities research needs to be interdisciplinary anymore than all humanities researchers are obliged to strive for transformative knowledge, but in an increasingly collaborative research landscape those working in the humanities need to think creatively about how they might collaborate with others (for practical purposes) as well as how they might forage (for curiosity) in disciplines and/or disciplinary configurations other than their own. The talk makes the case for interdisciplinary research without claiming that it is a panacea or that it is easy to practice, especially given institutional obstacles and constraints. Examples are supplied from recent or ongoing collaborative research projects and programs at my own institution, the University of Leeds (UK).