Pasts and Futures of the Global Humanities - Prof Nicholas B Dirks

"Pasts and Futures of the Global Humanities: Worldly knowledge and knowledge of the world

The modern history of the global humanities in the United States began in the recognition during the second world war that the US had limited knowledge of the world outside of North America and Europe. The establishment of the Office of Strategic Services by President Roosevelt led to the recruitment of academics to address this critical lacuna, which in turn led to the creation of area studies programs and initiatives across most major research universities in the decades after the war. “Area studies” were massively supported not just by the government but major foundations, and university research and graduate education exploded in both social scientific and humanistic fields. Inasmuch as these programs served a broader US interest to create strategic forms of scholarship and education, they also provided the basis for post-imperial view of the world. In time, UK universities, wrestling with the implications of global decolonization, sought to introduce new initiatives based on US models.

As area studies gave way to global imperatives to connect knowledge about specific areas and to focus more global processes than local places, they become far more vested in the humanities, losing some of their institutional authority. And today, in the rush to critique and dismantle global relationships and partnerships – along with other attacks on and skepticism about the humanities broadly speaking – questions arise about how the global humanities can both thrive in the future and respond to new kinds of imperatives. Further, the steady shift from old metropolitan centers of knowledge to multiple worldly locations, as universities in both the US and the UK face increasing financial and political pressures, carries with it both opportunities and challenges. In this lecture I will suggest some future directions for how we might adapt to the new contextual frames of and for worldly knowledge.

About the Speaker

Nicholas B. Dirks is President and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences, one of the oldest scientific organizations in the United States. Previously, Nick served as Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and Executive VP and Dean of the Faculty for Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. A leading scholar of South Asian history, anthropology and postcolonial studies, he is the author of eight books, including City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University.

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