GRS 390J Professional Development Topics

Humanities Seminar (The Future of Disciplinary Knowledges)
(Offered for grade or CR/NC)


Instructor: Evan Carton, Director, University of Texas Humanities Institute

Fall of 2001 marks the inaugural semester of the University of Texas Humanities Institute, a center for collaborative inquiry into issues of interdisciplinary intellectual import and broad social consequence. Each year the Institute will operate a weekly seminar, comprised of selected UT faculty fellows and graduate students from across the disciplines who will bring their range of methodologies and disciplinary literatures to bear on the topic of inquiry that has been chosen as the informing issue or theme of that year's Institute programs. The topic of the inaugural 2001-2002 Institute seminar--and of the public lecture series and seminar meetings with distinguished visiting scholars that will attach to it--is The Future of Disciplinary Knowledges. The seminar will examine the history of academic disciplines, their contemporary opportunities, crises, and states of transformation and interrelation, and the prospects and challenges for disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in the changing intellectual, institutional, and social economies of the 21st century. Among the exciting prospects of the seminar is the opportunity for the faculty and graduate student fellows of the Institute to serve as an informal think tank charged with imagining new curricular structures and logics and with advising the University on its future allocation of intellectual and financial resources.

The seminar will meet on Thursday afternoons from 2-5. Selected graduate fellows of the Institute may take the seminar either for a semester or for the full year and will receive 3 hours of graduate course credit for each semester's work. Graduate students interested in taking or learning more about the seminar must apply to Evan Carton, Professor of English and Humanities Institute director. He may be contacted at 471-8916 or 232-9463 or by email at e.carton@mail.utexas.edu

Faculty are as follows:

Fall 2001

  • Thomas Darwin, Graduate School Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program
  • Veit Erlmann, History of Music Chair and Professor of Ethnomusicology
  • Karl Galinsky, Cailloux Centennial Professor of Classics
  • Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Assistant Professor of Design
  • Horace Newcomb, F.J. Heyne Centennial Professor, Radio-Television-Film
  • Gilbert Rappaport, Assoc. Professor of Slavic Languages & Literature
  • Denise Spellberg, Assoc. Professor of History & Middle Eastern Studies
  • Pauline Strong, Associate Professor of Anthropology
  • Alexandra Wettlaufer, Assoc. Professor of French and Comparative Lit.

Spring 2002

  • Dana Cloud, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
  • Andrew Dell'Antonio, Assistant Professor of Musicology
  • Neil Foley, Assoc. Professor of History and American Studies
  • Amparo Garcia Crow, Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance
  • Niles Hansen, Leroy G. Denman, Jr. Regents Professor in Economics
  • A. P. Martinich, Vaughan Centennial Professor of Philosophy
  • Thomas Palaima, Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics
  • Kathleen Stewart, Associate Professor of Anthropology
  • Jeffrey Tulis, Associate Professor of Government

Geraldine Heng (Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the Humanities Institute) and Thomas Darwin will complete the faculty.