The UC Davis Humanities Institute is an interdisciplinary research center that supports UC Davis faculty in the humanities and humanistically-oriented social sciences through Intellectual Collaborations, Grant Assistance, and Event Support. It also brings the campus and larger community together to address pressing issues in the Public Intellectuals Forum, a collaboration with the Center for History, Society, and Culture. Current DHI priorities include scholarship on California and its surrounding regions and digital innovation. These are supported through the California Cultures Initiative and the Digital Humanities Initiative. The DHI also offers office space for meetings and visiting scholars.
The DHI advocates broadly for the humanities through membership in national organizations as well as the UC Humanities Consortium, a system-wide network of humanities centers that, along with the UC Humanities Research Institute and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts, provides a wide range of financial and intellectual resources for scholars in the arts and humanities throughout the state of California. The DHI is funded by the Office of the President through the Humanities Consortium Multi Campus Research Initiative, the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, the Vice Chancellor of Research, and the Dean of Social Sciences.
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View our 2008-2009 Annual Report
Announcing the UC Humanities Network
The UC Office of Research has awarded major funding over five years to the UC Humanities Network. This network will link three related elements: the new UC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, a multi-tiered program of research fellowships for ladder-track faculty and graduate students; the new UC Consortium of Humanities Centers, a system-wide network of campus humanities centers and multi-campus research groups; and the nationally-renowned UC Humanities Research Initiative, which has a central networking role and itself continues to offer an ambitious portfolio of programs. Funds for these programs will begin flowing throughout the UC system this month.
Faculty Research Seminars 2010-11:
Call for General Topic Proposals
The UC Davis Humanities Institute invites general TOPIC proposals for next year’s faculty research seminar. In this first phase of the proposal process, faculty members are invited to convene a research seminar around a broad topic of interdisciplinary inquiry.
Introducing POV@DHI
This new blogsite - povatdhi.wordpress.com - provides an open forum for UC Davis faculty and graduate students in the humanities to discuss issues related to research in our field, its place within the University, and its value to our students and the public. Readers are invited to comment on POV pieces via the blog and to submit pieces for future columns to ctdelapena@ucdavis.edu.
The second essay, “Where is pleasure in the humanities crisis?” by Karl Zender, Professor Emeritus of English, is excerpted here:
Professor de la Peña has asked me to expand on a question I posed for Andrew Delbanco at the October 22 Public Intellectuals Forum, about the challenges posed in recent years to the term “humanities” and about whether the term continues to designate a set of values and beliefs widely shared by scholars and teachers of language, literature, and the arts.
With apologies, I’m not going to do this. Instead, I’m going to ruminate for a moment about another question I would have liked to have asked. As an emeritus professor of English, I no longer teach. But when I did, at the beginning of the quarter I’d often put the phrase “Literature is a form of _________” on the blackboard and invite students to fill in the blank. I wasn’t looking for the “right” answer—I don’t think that there is a single right answer—but sooner or later I would let my students know that my own preferred completion is “pleasure.” (Sometimes, if I was lucky, this would lead to a discussion of the difference between intellectual and physical pleasure, between literary pleasure and entertainment, and of the fascination of what’s difficult.)
Next Public Intellectuals Forum: Leo Chavez on November 12
“May you live in interesting times,” says the proverbial Chinese curse. For higher education in particular, these are indeed interesting times, as public universities grapple with furloughs, fee hikes and other difficult strategies to address the current economic meltdown. But times of crisis can also provoke innovative thinking and reassessment — and this is what humanities scholars do best. In the 2009-10 Public Intellectuals Forum, three leaders in the field will offer their perspectives on “Beyond the Crisis: The Future of the University.”[more]