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HARC: breaking down
divisions between disciplines |
THERE IS A LOT of talk these days about interdisciplinarity, but this does not mean that a great deal is really being done in universities to break down divisions between departments and subjects. Royal Holloway’s new Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) has been formed to address some of the issues raised by interdisciplinary work.
One familiar problem, which has caused difficulties with funding bodies, is the relationship between academic research in the humanities and practical work in the arts, from new media work, to performance, and so on. HARC’s opening event tried to show how this divide might be crossed. Charles Bernstein, a poet and Professor of English, as well as a remarkable performer of his own work, read from his libretto for a new opera on the philosopher Walter Benjamin by Bryan Ferneyhough; music from the opera was played by the astonishing pianist Ian Pace. There was also a more ‘academic’ dialogue between Bernstein and the poet and critic, Allen Fisher. The discussion after the event was necessarily concerned both with the performances and with the ideas of the opera about language and time. This is a model on which HARC wishes to build.
HARC also involves research seminars that try to address the fact that theory in the humanities and arts tends to be rather parochial. If you work in literary and cultural studies you are quite likely to see things in terms of a series of theorists from Foucault to Levinas whose assumptions are regarded as highly questionable in certain areas of other subjects, such as philosophy or history. Professor Andrew Bowie, who runs the seminar series, is a Germanist whose main research is in philosophy, and who has written widely on both analytical and continental philosophy, literary theory, and music.
The aim of the seminars, attended by staff and research students from all the humanities and arts departments, is to get the participants to question some of the received theoretical wisdom in their own subject by confronting it with approaches from other subjects. The seminars involve discussion of figures such as Derrida, Rorty, Quine, Habermas, and Wittgenstein, as well as consideration of the difficulties of using their theories in relation to empirical research.
HARC is also concerned to coordinate the interdisciplinary research initiatives in the college. Professor Peter Longerich, who is a distinguished Holocaust historian and was a major witness in the Irving Trial, has focused work being done at Holloway on the Holocaust in history, philosophy and literary studies. Royal Holloway geographers are teaming up with practising artists to produce a substantial work of art, to be sited in the foyer of the College’s Queen's Building. Many other such initiatives are in the pipeline, such as a project on the fin de siècle in literature, music, art, and philosophy.
The programme of visiting speakers includes Professors Steven Connor, Manfred Frank, and Malcolm Bowie, a cultural theorist, a philosopher, and a literary critic and theorist, who will talk about their interdisciplinary work. Manfred Frank, for example, was the first to establish a real dialogue between French post-structuralism and German hermeneutics and critical theory.
HARC events February 2002
6 February: Professor Dan Diner, Professor at the Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig, will give a seminar on his work. Professor Diner specialises in the field of modern European history. His research interests cover Weimar and the Nazi period, history of law, history of the modern Middle East, and the history of international relations.
13 February: Professor Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College will give a lecture on ‘Skin: Towards a Historical Poetics’, which is his current research project. Professor Connor has published and broadcast widely on issues in literature and modern and postmodern culture.
27 February: Professor Manfred Frank of the Philosophy Department of Tübingen University will give the first lecture in a number of lectures planned by HARC on the issue of Subjectivity. Professor Frank is widely regarded as the most significant philosopher in Germany in the generation following Jürgen Habermas.
All events take place in Bourne Lecture Theatre 1, Egham Campus at 5pm. |
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