LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Rice University Humanities Research Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources present the Emerging Disciplines Symposium,  Friday, September 18, 2009, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM, in the Kyle Morrow Room  of the Rice University Fondren Library.

The symposium will feature prominent scholars from across academic disciplines who are shaping important new fields of scholarly inquiry. Participants will discuss the research questions that have served as the impetus for their new approaches, the methodological strategies that their emerging field entails, intellectual opportunities and challenges requisite to the emerging field, graduate student engagement, strategies for sustaining new research models, and other related issues.

The speakers represent a broad range of interdisciplinary fields, including music and the mind, neurohistory, deep history, cultural economy, cognitive approaches to art history, digital humanities, and new approaches to Americas studies.

Emerging Disciplines Symposium Speakers:

Hermann Herlinghaus
University of Pittsburgh
"From Transatlantic Histories of 'Intoxication' to a Hemispheric 'War on Affect': On the Paradox of Narconarratives" What are the uncommon driving forces behind this new field of Hemispheric-American Studies? A complex array of questions around which cultural, “pharmacological,” and bio-political concerns commingle relates to the status that conflicts over psychoactive substances have been acquiring. Psychoactives have passed, in the course of three centuries, from being highly esteemed commodities of transatlantic exchange and stimuli of modern life styles to matters that are today either banned, or restrictively codified. Using narcotics as a focus for transdisciplinary historicization can make evident how the Western Hemisphere has become the decisive scenario of conflict across which processes of long duration spanning discovery and colonization, modernization, and contemporary adjustments to geopolitical and psycho-cultural imperatives of advanced globalization link together. At the same time, paying attention to informal economies, spreading across and along the Mexican-American border and other zones, and to the way symbolic “narconarrative” territories are currently reshaping parameters of ethical imagination and epistemological debate in the Americas can help challenge existing boundaries regarding the fields of American studies, U.S. Latino studies, and Latin American literary and cultural criticism.

Aniruddh D. Patel
The Neurosciences Institute
"The Growth of Music Neuroscience" The past decade has seen a rapid rise in the study of music and the brain, prompted by the application of neuroscientific tools to long-standing questions about music and the mind. Dr. Patel will discuss some major topics in this research area, and outline several important issues in need of systematic research.

Mary Poovey
New York University
"What is Cultural Economy?" Dr. Poovey will discuss this emerging genre, which lies at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences. Contributors to the new journal, The Journal of Cultural Economy, and to the book series related to the journal use interpretive paradigms and empirical analysis to explore the changing relations between the three main organizing concepts of social and cultural study: culture, the economy, and the social.

Pamela Sheingorn
Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York
"Perceiving the Object: Cognitive Studies and Art History" The cognitive turn is in process in a wide range of disciplines and promises to provide art historians with significant new ways of describing viewer response. From how the mind-body perceives to how it remembers, the findings of neuroscience can help us comprehend the ways observers function in the presence of works of art. Specifically, through primary metaphors and mirror neurons, conceptual blending and the enactive view (to give some examples), cognitive studies offers a foundation in the mind-body itself for analyzing the impact on spectators of complex works. Such an approach enables study of the visual narratives and artifacts that combine text and image and that will be the focus of Dr. Sheingorn's talk.

Daniel Smail
Harvard University
"On the Prospects for a Neurohistory" One of the most crucial findings of the modern science of the brain is that important human institutions and cultural traits can have neurobiological effects, some passing and others more permanent. Insights like these are generating fascinating studies in fields like economics, political science, and law, and Dr. Smail will demonstrate that neurobiological insights also have important consequences for the study of history. "Deep History: A Broad Spectrum Approach to the Study of the Past" For centuries, Western history was framed in the comfortable certainty that human history could be no older than Creation itself, an event that was thought to have taken place some 6,000 years ago. The time revolution of the 1860s changed all that as a scientific reality, and only in recent years have historians become aware of the need to accept the long chronology of the natural sciences and to frame a seamless human history that extends into the distant past. But even as historians are moving into the deep history of humankind, archaeoscientists are increasingly bringing their tools to bear on the recent past. What emerges from this disciplinary conjuncture is broad spectrum history, a history that freely crosses both methodological as well as chronological divisions.

Todd Presner
University of California-Los Angeles
"Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge" While computational tools have been used in certain fields within the Humanities for several decades, the pervasive "digital turn" in the last five years has begun to transform the very state of knowledge -- that is to say, the ways we access and think about information within humanistic disciplines, how we produce and share knowledge, and even what we mean by knowledge. As our cultural heritage as a species migrates into digital formats (most of which are created and dictated by standards developed in the corporate world), the significance of the Humanities is not diminished but rather ever more vital to understand, contextualize, critique, and evaluate the technologies that are steadily re-constituting what, where, and how we know. As an emergent field, Digital Humanities represents a cross-disciplinary array of practices, methodologies, and interventions that variously critique, apply, and develop these technologies. Dr. Presner will focus on the growing intersections between programmable web applications (Web 2.0), the emergence of the field of Digital Humanities, and the question of the human vis-à-vis digitally-mediated knowledge.

The Humanities Research Center has copies of several books written by the participants. Please stop by Herring Hall 306 on the Rice Campus or call 713-348-4227 if you would like to borrow one.