After their first choice turned down an offer to be the director of the new Humanities Center, members of the search committee have narrowed the field to seven candidates.
The candidates - who teach at public and private universities around the country - will be visiting Brown during the next month and a half to speak about their interests in the humanities and in directing the Humanities Center, said Mary Ann Doane, interim director of the Humanities Center and professor of Modern Culture and Media.
Last spring, the position was offered to well-known feminist theorist and University of California-Berkeley professor Judith Butler, but she did not accept the position for personal reasons, said Dean of the Graduate School Karen Newman, who sits on the search committee. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Butler turned down the position because she did not want to leave California for Rhode Island.
The seven candidates - all senior professors at their current institutions - are Seth Lerer (English, Stanford University); Michael Steinberg (history, Cornell University); Kathleen Wood (English, University of Washington); Jane Gallop (English, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee); Carl Ernst (Religious Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill); Marc Redfield (English, Claremont Graduate University); and David Simpson (English, University of California-Davis).
Wood also directs the Humanities Center at Washington.
There is a board of faculty acting as a search committee for the director, Newman said. "The faculty represents many areas of the humanities across time periods, geographical areas and languages," she said.
At the end of the candidates' visits, committee members will "make a ranked list of who they'd like as the director. (Provost Robert Zimmer) will make the final decision, but we hope to have a director at the beginning of next year," Newman said.
The committee had originally hoped to have Butler in place as director for this academic year. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Brown offered positions to both Butler and her partner, a Berkeley political science professor, but they decided to remain at Berkeley.
Not having a director has left the identity of the Humanities Center unformed, Doane said. "The committee is not looking to bring in a mere administrator. We're looking for someone with a vision of how to shape this center and connect it to existing humanities centers in the United States and internationally," she said. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 130 universities have humanities centers already.
Currently, the Humanities Center is located in the basement of Alumnae Hall, but President Ruth Simmons is trying to raise funds to renovate Pembroke Hall to accommodate both the Humanities Center and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Doane said.
There is a small initial budget for the Humanities Center to initiate projects, Newman said, but she added that external funding would be solicited to support larger endeavors.
"We hope to attract donors from foundations and corporations, depending on the topics of the research," she said, citing Disney as a corporation that might be interested in supporting research about the globalization of culture.
Doane said she envisages the center offering year-long seminars to graduate and undergraduate students, sponsoring lecture series and "working groups of faculty and graduate students working on dissertations to come together with a topic or problem that cuts across disciplines, to research," she said.
Undergraduates will be a big part of the center's activities, Newman said, with opportunities for involvement in research similar to Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantships.
"We hope to establish a fellowship situation for selected undergraduates who are writing theses on a topic being researched in the working groups," she said, adding that undergrads can also benefit from attending center-sponsored lectures.
"I believe that research and teaching have a reciprocal relationship. Research enhances teaching and vice versa," Newman said.
Newman said the humanities aren't valued by society the way they should be - and the Humanities Center can improve public opinion about the field. "The larger culture is anti-intellectual - that is, people only value scientific endeavors," she said.
As an example, Newman described being given a graph when she became the dean of the Graduate School that depicted the governmental agencies donating money to the University. The National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Health and Human Services and Environmental Protection Agency all donated money, but the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts didn't give enough money to make a line on the graph, she said.
"It seems that the university is the only place left where research and work on the humanities is fostered and valued. Once the Humanities Center gets on its way, we can help the public at large," Newman said.
