UC Humanities Network: A New Humanities Initiative
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: The President’s Advisory Committee on Research in the Humanities, representing all ten campuses of the University of California, including all the humanities deans and the Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute, in consultation with the directors of the major UC humanities centers, is pleased to submit a proposal for the UC Humanities Network. Over the past 23 years, the University of California President’s Humanities Initiative has created and supported an intellectual infrastructure that has produced some of the world’s most important humanities research. We now propose to re-envision the ways in which the University of California can support humanities research, preserving and building upon what was best in the Initiative in a restructured multi-campus program designed to produce new synergies. The Humanities Network links together a new UC President’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, a multi-tiered program of research fellowships for faculty and graduate students; a new UC Consortium of Humanities Centers, a system-wide network of key humanities centers; and the nationally-renowned UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). UCHRI will play a central networking role, while continuing to offer an ambitious portfolio of programs, residences, conferences, fellowships, and initiatives, as well as the UC California Studies Consortium. These programs will support and stimulate excellence in humanities research across all ten UC campuses in a multi-campus program that is both multi-faceted and multi-layered. It will support the individual and collaborative research of senior and junior faculty, as well as the work of exceptional graduate students. These scholars will be integrated into an interdisciplinary network of campus-based humanities centers, and campus-based and multi-campus research groups, facilitated by the resources and staff of UCHRI, which has extensive experience in networking and multi-campus collaborations. The Humanities Network integrates most of the disciplines and research themes of the MRPI competition: international and area studies, social sciences, the history and future of science and technology, and California Studies. Over the next five years, it will make substantive intellectual contributions in such areas as digital humanities; transnational and global studies; culture, language, religion, and political theology, both their histories and their futures; medicine and humanities; science and technology studies; human rights; critical social theory; and visual cultures. Leveraging the collective and collaborative strengths of our ten campuses, while respecting each campus’s individual profile, the Humanities Network will situate the humanities at the crossroads of important disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates, while promoting knowledge, discovery, and modes of understanding crucial to California and its local and global communities.