Seminars

Home Vision Seminars Activities Achievements Residency Gallery

Seminars

ISHA seminars run for a year, and are organized around specific themes. Fellows alternate in leading the discussion, pursuing a particular project in which they are interested. Though the theme is common to all, Fellows inevitably approach it from their own points of view and disciplinary perspectives. The result is an interdisciplinary exchange which provides intellectual stimulation and furthers the individual and collaborative work of all concerned. The basis for discussion may be a formal or informal presentation; a set of readings (or images, or music); a piece of writing or work of art composed by the presenter(s); or some combination. The ethos is democratic and interactive, allowing for free-flowing discussion and stimulation.

Below you will find a description of our current seminar, as well as a list of the Fellows and their projects.

Call for Applications 2012-2013:
ISHA Seminar: Engagement: The Challenge of Public Scholarship

Proposal deadline: Friday, February 24th

In its inaugural year the newly established Interdisciplinary Studies Institute (IS) takes up the legacy of W.E. B. Du Bois for its first seminar entitled ‘Engagement: The Challenge of Public Scholarship’. Following in Du Bois’s footsteps, we’d like to consider what public engagement means to us today, in whatever fields we explore, whether in the humanities, arts, social sciences, or natural sciences. What does it mean to be an engaged scholar or artist? What lines do we cross over—or open up—when we transfer our spheres of learning and dissemination from the academic to the public? What examples do great public intellectuals and artists give us, what problems have they had to confront? We invite you to submit a proposal setting out your particular interests. All fellows will receive a $2000 research allowance.

Learn more.

ISHA Seminar 2011-2012: Transformations

In a world of objects and purported truths about those objects, perhaps it is the transformations of both we should be concerned with. History is a story of transformation, while continuity and change tug at the inner dynamics of politics, society, culture, science. In North Africa and the Middle East, longstanding regimes are changing in front of our eyes. New technologies have come into play, and those technologies themselves are transforming, even as they transform our world. Are we at a new threshhold, seeing the transformation of transformation in our time? The biological universe is one of transformation, as is our physical universe—which we understand now may be a ‘multiverse.’ Works of art transform the ‘real’; morphology is intrinsic to language; translation deals intimately with the tensions of fidelity and change. What are the secrets of transformation, its mechanisms and logics? What factors determine that a state of affairs, stable for so long, will suddenly give way and begin to alter? Or does the apparently stable conceal underlying transformations every day? How do legacies and traditions transform? Does transformation run all the way from the cell to the cosmos? How have our very concepts of transformation changed? Or is transformation only an illusion? From the political to the historical, the philosophical to the musical, the artistic to the political, the biological to the physical, transformation may be an underlying key we have to understand.

Fellows

Annaliese Bischoff

Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning

“Green Transformations Through Public Art”

Anne Ciecko

Communication
“Transformations of Arab Gulf Cinema and Media Cultures”

Stephen Forrest

Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (Japanese)

“Ehon hôkan: Transformations in 17th-century Japan”

David Glassberg

History

“History and Ecology in a No Analog World”