Center for Humanistic Inquiry Advisory Board

As a student and practitioner of one of the more humanistic social sciences, I have relished the intellectual opportunities that CHI has afforded us in the past decade. This space, both literally and metaphorically, has brought us together on numerous occasions. CHI reminds me what I cherish the most about being a part of an intellectual community. As an anthropologist I hope to contribute to the ongoing conversations and the future aspirations of CHI by bringing in questions of culture and globality that animate my work and my discipline. 

For me, being a good librarian means being curious about everything, including the intersections between scholarship and public life. I am keen to promote the library as a gathering space, providing opportunities for students and faculty to explore challenging and difficult ideas and make connections across the disciplines. I am excited about our continuing partnership with the CHI and look forward to expanding the ways in which we collaborate.

Since its inception almost a decade ago, the CHI has brought us together for shared conversations across disciplines, historical periods, and international perspectives. While I am committed to the Humanities broadly, as a scholar of ancient and classical India, I am particularly invested in premodern and global conceptions that complement and challenge the assumptions of the modern West. I look forward to working with colleagues and the Amherst community on how the CHI can continue to vitalize the Humanities at Amherst for students, faculty, and the broader community. 

I remain in awe of how the humanities continue to uncover and recover vital questions about how to think about the world around us, so I am thrilled to serve on the Center for Humanistic Inquiry Advisory Board. As a scholar of African American literature and culture, I am inspired by the ways in which upheaval, beauty, terror, and jubilance shape the human experience. The CHI, as a hub of humanities scholarship, curates bold, dynamic questions that are both urgent and timeless; its work is indispensable to our campus, community, and the world. I am excited to see how the CHI will continue to grow as the pith and fiber of rigorous intellectual exchange on campus.

Our civilization faces a myriad of complex and interconnected environmental and social problems – and amazing opportunities. To prepare our students to tackle and overcome these challenges, we need to give them the tools to integrate and connect ideas from diverse fields and to convey complex, multi-faceted ideas.  This is fundamental to our shared liberal arts endeavor.

As an economist, I study the choices people make.  As an economic historian, I know that these choices can only be understood by understanding the humans that make them, influenced by the ideologies, cultures and societies they inhabit.  Such a deep appreciation of the nuanced varieties of human experience, values and motivations can only come from the humanities.  Supporting the CHI’s mission to foster a rich and vibrant domain of humanistic inquiry at the College is vital if we are to nurture a new generation of humanists – and wiser economists – to face the unknown problems of the future.

In a relatively short time CHI has established itself as a hub for intellectual activity on the campus. From its program of visiting fellows organized around a theme to its weekly salons to its support for faculty/staff seminars, CHI does a wonderful job of bringing the Amherst community together. By serving on the Advisory Board I hope to support the important work that CHI does. I also hope to help CHI forge connections to the social sciences on campus and to other centers both in the United States and abroad. I also want to help promote public humanities activity and connect the work of the humanities to social, cultural, and political issues in the world beyond the academy. As articulated in the proposal that led to CHI’s creation, the so called crisis in the humanities affords an opportunity to continue to think about the future of the humanities at Amherst, “to foster the development of the next generation of humanities scholars for the liberal arts, nourish innovative scholarship and creative work, promote experimentation among scholars using various modes of humanistic inquiry” and to showcase the important work done under the banner of humanistic inquiry.

The Center for Humanistic Inquiry serves as a meaningful site of intersectional exploration and scholarly exchange at Amherst College. I believe that spaces like this that foster intellectual curiosity and critical thinking demonstrate the vital role that the arts - and the humanities more broadly - can play in building a more compassionate, democratic society. It is this connection between the arts and civic engagement that drives my work at the Mead Art Museum, and why I am proud to support the CHI's mission by serving on the Advisory Board. 

In less than a decade the CHI has become the most crucial venue at Amherst for sharing work in and across disciplines, geographies, and timelines. As a student of Greco-Roman literary-rhetorical culture and its receptions in later eras, I’m especially interested in how Classics can remain in dialogue with other methodologies and institutional spaces. My own discipline’s nascent willingness to challenge its intellectual constraints and blind spots can both benefit from and contribute to the wealth of fields in the Humanities. Sharing work and learning from the work of others is also one of the great benefits of the CHI, and this shared endeavor is one of the crucial ways in which it continues to challenge and strengthen the Humanities at Amherst and beyond.

The Center for Humanistic Inquiry is an extraordinary example of bringing different perspectives in humanistic thinking to a shared intellectual landscape and I’m pleased to be a member of the advisory board supporting this mission. I am particularly intrigued by the current themes of home and homelessness and their weighted meanings and implications across cultures. As director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, I find these themes resonating deeply in Dickinson’s identity and poetry. The broad dimensions of CHI’s two-year exploration of home will tremendously expand our engagement with a concept that is at the core of our understandings of ourselves and others on this planet.