Eleven faculty members have been chosen by the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute (ISI) as fellows for its 2015-16 seminar on “Secrecy, Publicity, Privacy, Security.” The fellows will approach the theme from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the humanities to geosciences, computer science to finance. Each fellow will receive a $1,500 research allowance and participate in a yearlong faculty seminar.

In their responses to the theme, ISI asked the fellows to consider the quadrant of concerns from the point of different disciplinary and creative perspectives. In addition to present anxieties over surveillance, fellows were challenged in the call for proposals to consider how secrecy, publicity, privacy, and security work today as well as how they have been constructed in the past. What, at this point, is secret, public, private, or secure? How might the four-term theme engage with secret histories, the market place, or science’s struggle to translate its private languages into public terms? How do the humanities deal with epistemologies of the hidden and the ethics of uncovering and revelation? Overall, the ISI seeks a set of searching and stimulating perspectives that shed light on what value has meant and can come to mean.

The 2014-15 fellows are Nikolaos Artavanis, Finance; Allison Butler, Communication; Jennifer Fronc, History; Piper Gaubatz, Geosciences; Jarice Hanson, Communication; Toussaint Losier, Afro-American Studies; Gerome Miklau, Computer Science; TreaAndrea Russworm, English; Daniel Sack, English; Jenny Vogel, Art; and Nicholas Xenos, Political Science.