Cornell’s Society for the Humanities celebrated its 60th anniversary Sept. 18-19 with two days of events. Panel discussions, receptions and a formal dinner highlighted the role of the Society, which is based in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), as an innovative platform for diverse humanities research that integrates scholars from Cornell and from external institutions.
“The Society has been an important incubator for humanities research since it was founded in 1966,” said Durba Ghosh, director of the Society for Humanities and professor of history (A&S).
Established at the forefront of a national movement to lift humanities studies, the Society has hosted more than 800 fellows, 600 of whom are living. Nearly 100 came to Ithaca to join the weekend’s events. This year, 18 scholars are working on the theme “Survival” as Society Fellows (from outside Cornell); Faculty Fellows (from within Cornell); Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows; Cornell Graduate Student Fellows and Humanities Scholars Postdoctoral Associates.
“For humanists, it is almost never possible to declare that we’re done – there is always a problem to be critically analyzed, investigated and theorized,” Ghosh said to an audience including former and current Society fellows and former directors. “I hope you can look around and feel proud of what we have collectively achieved, which – in spite of the many challenges – is surviving. As we continue to sustain a new generation of scholars, I hope you can imagine that you would share with them to give them courage to keep going.”
Saturday’s program began with a conversation among three of the Society’s former directors: Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus in the Department of Literatures in English; Brett de Bary, professor of Asian studies, emerita; and Timothy Murray, professor of comparative literature and literatures in English, emeritus (all A&S) followed by several former fellows discussing the impact of the Society on their work. Saturday’s sessions were recorded and will be archived.
A focus of the weekend was collecting archival materials, such as books, papers, emails and event posters, to be added to Cornell’s archives. Fellows were also invited to record oral histories capturing the research they accomplished and the experiences they had while at Cornell.
“Our hope is that it becomes a resource,” Ghosh said. “The humanities are not just about classic canonic texts that everybody thinks we should read. Rather, humanities scholarship has a dynamism of its own. It’s constantly evolving. We’re studying more languages than we have before; we’re studying more parts of the world than we ever have before.”
In its first years, the society invited leading humanities scholars to Cornell for one-year terms to share and collaborate with Cornell faculty members. The Society’s model has developed through the decades, growing to accommodate new categories of fellows, Ghosh said, while maintaining a research and learning environment.
“The Society has always aspired to be at the cutting edge of the humanities,” said Shawkat Toorawa, the Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, who was a Faculty Fellow in 2001 and is now a member of its external advisory board. “This has remained constant, but not stagnant. Rather, it constantly evolves to capture the many ways the humanities operate in the academy and society.”
A Cornell faculty member in the Department of Near Eastern Studies (A&S) from 2000-2016, Toorawa said the annual themes – for instance, “Occupation” in 2013-14, “Energy” in 2019-20 and “Survival” this academic year – keep the Society’s work in dialogue with the world beyond the university.
For Culler, who directed the Society from 1984-1993, a highlight of the weekend was hearing about the transformations in fellows’ work the residency made possible.
“All remarked on the way in which the daily contact with scholars in other fields working on different projects, which were nonetheless related to that year’s focal theme, led them to broaden the scope of their work, take on topics that had not previously occurred to them,” he said. “Most identified ways in which their experience in our interdisciplinary environment led them to work towards bringing about similar possibilities for scholars in their own institutions.”
For example, he said, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, a 2021-22 (“Afterlives”) Society Fellow who’s now a faculty member at Hunter College, the City University of New York, was inspired by her time as a fellow to reconceive and remake the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter with a Mellon grant. And Mary Jacobus, professor of literatures in English, emerita (A&S), went on to establish the Center for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, now “a major institution,” Culler said. Jacobus was a Faculty Fellow in 1986-87 and 1997-98 and returned to Ithaca as an external Society Fellow in 2009-10.
Each director has been a leading scholar and innovator in their own field, each leaving a unique mark on the Society, combining individual strengths with the intellectual atmosphere of the time, said de Bary, who was director from 2003-2008 and 2013-14.
Most recently, Paul Fleming, the L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis Professor of Humanities and the former Taylor Family Director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities (2017-2024), maintained the Society’s reputation for work in critical theory and opened a new field – Rural Humanities, she said.
“The Society is affirming the importance of work that explores the diverse society of our times, which certainly has been transformed many times since my time as director, including the impact of Black Lives Matter,” de Bary said. “We are a different society today and the university is, by the same token, a different place. I think work exploring the historical sensibilities of those who share this space with us right now is providing new and very richly textured perspectives on our world.”
Nasrin Olla, Ph.D. ’19, assistant professor of English and African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, said being a Society Fellow during the 2017-18 “Corruption” year has influenced her path as a scholar.
“The society shaped my writing because it brought me into contact with poets, philosophers and theorists who were central to my research,” Olla said. “It also had an enduring impact on my pedagogy as I rely on a set of concepts and tools that I picked up taking classes given by Visiting Fellows over the course of my time as a graduate student. In short, I would not be the kind of scholar I am without the Society.”
The Society provides the hub for urgent work during a time of political and financial stress, said Susan Buck-Morss, the Jan Rock-Zubrow ’77 Chair Emerita in the Department of Government (A&S). “Never has there been such a need to work collaboratively to realize humanist goals,” she said. “Never has the need been greater for scientists to reflect on the human implications of their research.”
“Since the 1960s, commentators have regularly declared that there is a crisis in the humanities and many aspiring scholars have been told that there is no future in the humanities,” Ghosh said at the weekend’s concluding event, a dinner. “And yet, here you all are.”
