Center for Humanistic Inquiry 2018-19 Seminars

& The "&" (Ampersand) seminar aims to put the “and” back in “Arts and Sciences" by: 1) creating a greater sense of community among faculty through a recognition of common intellectual interests and an increased understanding and appreciation of our respective fields in the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, and STEM; 2) initiating new lines of inquiry and fields of study through interdisciplinary approaches, which may in turn influence both the areas of faculty research and curriculum development; and 3) engaging with contemporary issues (e.g., food and waste, artificial intelligence, etc.) that would benefit from the input and insight of a variety of disciplines and approaches, validating the very purpose of a liberal arts institution.

Co-chairs: Karamatou Yacoubou Djima (Mathematics) and Sanam Nader-Esfahani (French).

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In recent years, scholars in a wide range of fields have drawn attention to the role of Protestant sensibilities in producing many of the binary divisions that characterize secular modernity: immanent/transcendent, nature/culture, nature/“man,” faith/reason, and church/state. Indeed, the scholarship describes how a specific Protestant emphasis on interior belief came to serve as the basis for the ostensibly universal phenomena of religion (for example, in the pioneering anthropologist E.B. Tylor’s definition of religion as “belief in spiritual beings”). Nevertheless, following the work of Talal Asad, a wave of recent research has begun to detail the ways in which this Protestant basis obscures the realities of religious traditions that are organized in other ways.  For example, these scholars have drawn attention to the centrality of phenomena such as embodiment, political power, affect, and the agency of supernatural beings within religions other than Protestantism.  Put another way, this scholarship has shown religion to be a colonial category. This reading group has considered an emergent scholarship that details the various ways in which Protestantism itself was never actually a matter of interior belief--that is, how embodiment, political power, affect, and the agency of supernatural beings always remained central to its activities; how Protestants continue to engage with hybrids of the immanent and transcendent, nature and culture, nature and “man,” faith and reason, and church and state.

Chair: Amy Cox Hall (Anthropology)

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The impetus for this group was a sense of the dearth of premodern Humanities at Amherst: faculty across all departments who base their work on ancient, classical, or medieval traditions or civilizations. As colleagues became aware of this and the shallow presentism it indicates and portends for students and the broader culture, they began to gather to discuss this situation. Efforts developed organically and emerged over time from a sense of intellectual chemistry and shared sense of purpose in the group. Meeting about once a month for the last two years, participants have read work in the Humanities that bridges their interests, and have read one another's work. This past year, the group formed a Mellon-funded First-year Seminar (FYSE) cluster which is rolling out its course, "Beginnings," in Fall 2019. At the same time, it has drawn on CHI funding for its intellectual and scholarly meetings, retaining its scholarly community apart, and as adjunct to, its work on the course.

Chair: Ingrid Nelson (English).

Participants: Maria Heim, Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Michael Kunichika, George Qaio, Yael Rice, Sergey Glebov, and Tom Zanker. Affiliates: Catherine Infante, Tariq Jaffer, and Chris van den Berg.

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The Being Human in STEM (HSTEM) Initiative aims to foster a more inclusive, supportive STEM community by helping students, faculty, and staff collaboratively develop a framework to understand and navigate diverse identities in the classroom, lab, and beyond. We read and discuss research literature from education, sociology, psychology fields to better understand how to enhance success and inclusion in learning STEM at Amherst. One result has been a handbook on inclusive practices for STEM (and all!) faculty. Another has been a project-based course empowers students to investigate issues of diversity in STEM through combining academic inquiry with lasting community engagement, a model that has been copied at other institutions. The seminar is dedicated to help participants learn about how STEM is strenghthened by humanities-based inquiry.

Chair: Sheila Jaswal (Chemistry)