February 4, 2013
by Rick Livingston
Word comes from Ian Baucom, President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, that CHCI has received a three-year Mellon Foundation Grant for a project on “Integrating the Humanities Across National Boundaries.”
Designed to explore models for collaborative work among CHCI institutions worldwide, the initiative will begin with two pilot projects: one on Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging (aka RelSec); the other, code-named HfE, on Humanities for the Environment, growing out of last year’s CHCI conference theme on “Humanities in the Age of the Anthropocene.”
RelSec links four institutions—Portland State, Utrecht, Tel Aviv, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong—around a coordinated set of research programs. Responding to the declining persuasiveness of secularization narratives, this research takes up questions about how “current formations of the religious and the secular [are] shaping local, national, transnational and “universal” measures of political belonging.”
Under the rubric of Humanites For the Environment, CHCI will establish research “observatories” in Australia, Europe and North America, with the US supporting regional clusters in the Southeast, West and Northeast. “Each observatory,” Ian Baucom writes, “will spend the first two years of the project addressing a particular thematic strain within the Anthropocene Humanities,” culminating in an international conference dedicated to elaborating the next phase of the research.
Both of these initiatives will be explored further at the upcoming CHCI conference at the Hall Center in Lawrence, KS (April 25-27).