Beginning fall 2008, Miami University students, faculty, and community will welcome the opening of a new humanities center.
The winning proposal of the annual President's Academic Enrichment Award (PAEA), the center is the beneficiary of a $250,000 grant.
As one of the four co-writers of the proposal, Kerry Powell, chair of the English Department, said the humanities center can be seen as a union of multiple areas of study.
"The general idea behind the proposal was to create a center that would bring together the various programs and departments in the humanities at Miami," Powell said. "We want to create an environment for people to work together and support each other."
In addition to Powell, Charles Ganelin, Spanish and Portuguese chair, Laura Mandell, associate professor of English, and Wietse de Boer, associate professor of history, co-authored the proposal.
For de Boer, the ultimate goal of the humanities center is twofold, the desire to unite students and scholars in their studies of humanities and to share this scholarship with the larger public, either in traditional ways or through digital media.
"First of all, the center is born out of the recognition by the university, particularly in the departments and programs that deal with humanities, that the humanities are a critical group of studies in the world today," de Boer said.
De Boer said that thinking creatively and critically about the world's issues, such as environmental change, cultural and religious conflict, and globalization, is essential in the study of the humanities.
"We live in a world in which science and technology are ever more present and are major engines of social change," de Boer said, "but we feel the humanities have an extremely important role in inviting people to think critically about these changes and the ways in which they affect their lives."
According to Powell, work on the proposal initially began in the fall of 2007 through a series of discussions and informal meetings that eventually produced the winning proposal. In terms of programming, Powell said the center will feature faculty-based research along with public outreach programs and new curriculum initiatives such as new thematic sequence options or jointly taught graduate level classes.
"The whole idea behind the center is that its purpose is interdisciplinary within the humanities," Powell said. "It will seek to develop connections between departments like English, history, Spanish and Portuguese, French, philosophy, religion and the classics to serve a common purpose."
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Once the proposal was finished, it was submitted in January to the PAEA committee for revision, said Powell. The proposal was then recommended by the committee to Miami President David Hodge for funding.While the location of the humanities center is not official, Powell said early talks have suggested the third floor of Laws Hall as a potential home. With the upcoming opening of the new Farmer School of Business in 2009, Laws Hall will be renovated and could see the new humanities center in about two to three years, according to Powell.
Despite the lack of a permanent home, Allan Winkler, history professor and newly appointed director of the humanities center, said activities are already in the works for next fall.
"Right off the bat, I'd like to get people together from the humanities for a series of conversations," Winkler said. "We want to bring people from outside the university to be consultants, so we're not trying to reinvent the wheel."
With more than 35 years of teaching experience and a long list of involvement in the humanities, Winkler said that the humanities is where his passion lies.
"I bring a number of strengths useful to this area of study," Winkler said. "I have been a proponent of the humanities for as long as I can remember."
Winkler said the center is also tentatively planning a humanities day for spring 2009 which would feature various works on campus including lectures and performances in order to publicize the center.
Powell said a conference will also take place in 2009 to draw together ideas.
"Humanities centers exist at many universities and not at Miami until now," Powell said. "We're trying to put into place something here that has worked well elsewhere and that would work well for Miami."
For de Boer, the aim for the humanities center is to have an outreach beyond Oxford.
"We hope this humanities center will be a very visible place for the community, even the regional community and also to the world at large," de Boer said. "The various digital media make it feasible to have conversations that go beyond this university, this town, this region. We want to take advantage of al means to communicate with the rest of the world."
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