WELCOME to the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Our goals are to advance research in the humanities. Our programs--including fellowships and undergraduate research grants, the Day in the Humanities, lectures, conferences, and faculty-graduate student study groups--support departments and institutes in the humanities and social sciences through interdisciplinary exchanges. Our website provides a calendar of current activities, as well as information on our programs.
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From the Director
The Humanities Institute has a unique role in UConn's mission; it is the central source of support for research in the Humanities. UCHI is the Humanities' version of the laboratory in which theories are posited, tested, debated, and refined through the intellectual exchanges that constitute the daily life of the Institute.
Our Fellows exemplify the vitality and currency of the Humanities through their wide-ranging contributions to the University community. They enrich its research productivity, undergraduate and graduate programs, and outreach to the broader community.
In the last decade we have too often seen education denigrated; it is the responsibility of researchers in the Humanities to educate students and the public to a revaluing of intellectualism. Working in an interdisciplinary environment helps alter disciplines themselves and opens windows into the truly multinationalnature of the past while illuminating our present and our future in equally new and challenging ways. Naeem Murr, fiction writer and 2009-10 UCHI Fellow, has observed that writing (and the research that is integral to any serious writing) is a "reaction to the silences around us" (The Perfect Man, Appendix). We in the Humanities-whether language and literature specialists, historians, political scientists, artists, multicultural specialists, philosophers, or cultural anthropologists-are always invested in research that resists silences. That concept brings together the core goals of the Humanities Institute: to cross boundaries between disciplines, but also to cross intellectual and creative boundaries, and, in the interests of all human beings, to emerge on the other side of silences.
We and the University accomplish those goals most successfully by recognizing the importance of research in the Humanities and the dissemination of the revisionary ideas that emerge from that research. We have moved far beyond the 'under-siege mentality' that suggests the Humanities are no longer significant to our existence. We have never been more relevant, and those of us at the Institute look forward to working in partnership with all facets of the university and broader community as we envision the only viable possibility for our future: crossing disciplines to learn about national, racial, religious, and cultural differences that lead to the acceptance of multiple opinions, multiple life choices, and multiple political policies. The humanities are not simply about the inner life. They are about the systems of artistic and intellectual inquiry through which we interrogate the world in which we live-and create a future in which we want to live. The Humanities Institute accomplishes these goals by supporting our Fellows as they pioneer new and collaborative research to help shape that future.
Sharon M. Harris |
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University of Connecticut |