Cogut Institute for the Humanities

2023–24 Annual Report

Groundwork for the Future

From the Director

The past academic year was an extraordinary time of growth for the Cogut Institute, as key projects came to fruition. The Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB) initiative, which has been an important part of the institute since 2018, was elevated into a full-fledged center, directed by environmental scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris. This new center, housed within the institute, will have the capacity and infrastructure to advance critical research and curricula in the coming years. We also established our first multi-year collaborative humanities lab, “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities,” led by historian Holly Case and computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian. It is thrilling to see the constellation of leaders and projects within the institute expand in this way. These new formations join a series of initiatives that have been making vital contributions over the past year, including the Disability Studies Working Group, which has sponsored events and networking opportunities, as well as the popular Film-Thinking series, which combines eclectic film showings with dynamic panel discussions and audience Q&A.

This is a vibrant and transformative time in the humanities, and we are excited to be a part of it. Despite claims regularly made in the media that the academic humanities are in decline, the work we do is increasingly important in the face of global challenges such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and public health. In our increasingly interconnected world, policy makers, scientists and technologists, and practitioners of all sorts turn to humanities experts for crucial perspectives on the historical and cultural archive and on questions of values and ethics. The humanities are also thriving on their own terms outside the academy, as the lively world of book and film criticism, podcasts, and online cultural commentary attests.

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Amanda Anderson
Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities

Laying the Groundwork for Growth

Andrews House, a Hub for the Humanities at Brown

This summer, the Cogut Institute bid farewell to its longtime home of Pembroke Hall — which it has shared with the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women since 2008 — and moved to Andrews House on Brown Street.

The building has received a stunning renovation that restores many of its elegant historical details while also updating the building for contemporary use as a technologically equipped place for study, teaching, and events. The building will serve as a hub for the humanities at Brown, not only housing the institute’s own courses and events, but also offering space for other academic units to host humanities programming. The building includes expanded capacity for housing fellows, doctoral students, and the institute’s programs.

Andrews House from the garden

Andrews House seminar room

Andrews House entryway

Andrews House media lab

Andrews House event space

Andrews House grand staircase

Elevating the Environmental Humanities

Since its inception in 2018, the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB) has gathered scholars across the University with shared investments in developing local and global responses to our present environmental crises. The initiative has hosted dozens of events intended to spark dialogue and advance research. Most recently, J.T. Roane (Rutgers University) explored the lessons of June Jordan’s political vision for place-based practices and Scott Slovic (Oregon Research Institute) addressed the challenges faced by writers who want to emphasize the harms done to the earth while also provoking concrete environmental action.

Mark Cladis introduces Scott Slovic

J.T. Roane and the audience talk after the event

Scott Slovic discusses environmental warning messages

As of July 1, 2024, the initiative has been elevated to a full-fledged center, with Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media) appointed as its inaugural director. As a center, EHAB gains the infrastructure for larger-scale programming and curricular innovations.

Macarena Gómez-Barris
Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media)

Macarena Gómez-Barris on a panel at Earth(ly) Matters
Gómez-Barris has been invested in EHAB since its first conference in 2018

Exploring Humanities Perspectives on AI

Humanities perspectives are crucial to understanding the impact and implications of artificial intelligence. Beginning this fall, Holly Case (History) and Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Computer Science, Data Science) are leading the Cogut Institute’s first multi-year collaborative humanities lab, “Models-Scale-Context,” a project that advances AI research through programming, teaching, and publications.

In its focus on three basic terms of everyday and scientific discourse, “Models-Scale-Context” highlights assumptions and frameworks through which AI is imagined and implemented. Questioning what these terms mean across disciplines and technological practices, the lab explores the modes of thinking, being, and doing that have shaped AI and could determine its possible futures.

Holly Case
Holly Case (History)

Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Computer Science, Data Science)

 

In the latest episode of the podcast “Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities,” guest Hollis Robbins, a scholar of African American literature and Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah, talks with host Amanda Anderson about the institutional and disciplinary condition of the humanities, highlighting AI and its impact on the ways scholars approach their work.

Cultivating Collaborative Learning and Research

Building a Community of Scholars Who Work Together

The Collaborative Humanities Initiative supports events and courses that help build community, prepare students for careers in and beyond academia, and catalyze important research on pressing subjects.

Central to the initiative is the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities program, which features innovative, team-taught courses in which collaborative, interdisciplinary methods yield meaningful, creative research.

Caroline Levine talks with Yannick Ettoundi

Will Johnson, Jay Loomis, and Kamari Carter discussing their work

Hear from some members of the doctoral certificate community about their experiences with the program:

Congratulations to recent doctoral certificate recipients

Eight doctoral students from seven departments completed the doctoral certificate this past year: Istifaa Ahmed (American Studies), Kamari Carter (Music and Multimedia Composition), Sneha Chowdhury (Comparative Literature), Yannick Etoundi (History of Art and Architecture), Matthew Kateb Goldman (American Studies), Will Johnson (Music and Multimedia Composition), Jay Loomis (Musicology and Ethnomusicology), and Prudence Ross (English). The total number of graduates now comes to 63 in the program’s sixth year. Congratulations to all!

All doctoral certificate recipients

Innovations in the Undergraduate Curriculum

This past year, the institute offered three team-taught undergraduate courses developed under the aegis of the Collaborative Humanities Course Award program. The courses gave faculty members the opportunity to experiment with sources and methods to extend their own research and invite undergraduates to explore exciting themes in enriching ways.

  • Form and Formalism,” taught by Lindsay Caplan (History of Art and Architecture) and Govind Menon (Applied Mathematics), examined the cultural and theoretical lineages contributing to the rise of digital technologies such as the computer and artificial intelligence.
  • Ice, Coral, Dust and Pollen: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Climate History,” taught by Daniel Enrique Ibarra (Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences/Environment and Society) and Brian Lander (History/Environment and Society), explored the phenomenon of climate change throughout the planet’s history.
  • The City in Strife: Mapping Segregations, Inequality, Insurrection,” taught by Patrick Heller (International and Public Affairs/Sociology) and Vazira Zamindar (History), examined historical patterns of city formation.

Designing and teaching ‘Form and Formalism’ with Lindsay Caplan has been one of the most important teaching experiences in my 20 years at Brown ... The tension between science and humanism runs deep within society. All our incentives — at least in the sciences — lead us to greater specialization. On the other hand, foundational questions continue to require a deep appreciation of the historical evolution of knowledge. Form and formalism allowed us to investigate one such strand with great care.

Govind Menon (Applied Mathematics)
 
Portrait of Govind Menon

34

Total courses offered in 2023–24

10

Collaborative Humanities Seminars

13

Courses taught by institute fellows

20

Departments/units represented

Fellows Seminar

At the heart of the institute is the Fellows Seminar, an incubator for some of the most exciting humanities research at Brown. It brings together a cohort of scholars across disciplines and stages of career — from undergraduates to faculty — to share and workshop individual research projects and to explore each other’s ideas collectively. This rigorous yet supportive environment both benefits the individual projects and helps the fellows to forge collegial, professional relationships that impact their work beyond the fellowship.

Congratuations to this year’s undergraduate fellows on earning their degrees!

  • Portrait photo of Maru Attwood

    Maru Attwood

    Project: “Footpaths and Fences: A Spatial History of Nsikazi, South Africa”
  • Portrait photo of Lucia Kan-Sperling

    Lucia Kan-Sperling

    Project: “Reading Digitally: Technology, Language, and the Poetics of Digital Subjectivity”
  • Portrait photo of James Langan

    James Langan

    Project: “Rereading Modernity: Specters of Cannibalism in the Caribbean Avant-Garde”
  • Portrait photo of Andrew Lu

    Andrew Lu

    Project: “Devouring Stone: Rethinking the Monstrous in Romanesque Monastic Sculpture”
  • Portrait photo of Grace Xiao

    Grace Xiao

    Project: “(Dis)location, Diaspora, and the Camera Image: Contemporary Women Artists of the South Asian Diaspora”

Several of the undergraduate fellows received special recognition for their work:

  • Maru Attwood — the John Thomas Memorial Award for best history thesis
  • Lucia Kan-Sperling — the Preston Gurney Literary Prize in cultural criticism and the Barbara Banks Brodsky Prize in English
  • Andrew Lu and Grace Xiao — the Ann Belsky Moranis Memorial Prize from the Department of History of Art and Architecture for outstanding and imaginative work

Lucia Kan-Sperling was also awarded the Taiwan Ministry of Education’s Huayu Enrichment Scholarship to continue her studies next year.

The fellows all publicly introduced their research in a pair of live webinars showcasing the extraordinary diversity and vitality of their work.

Meet the Fellows

Building Community Through Dialogue

Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series

The institute’s flagship event series brought to campus three high-profile speakers suggested by Brown students and faculty members. Journalist Masha Gessen discussed the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East; author Amitav Ghosh considered the intertwined histories of colonialism in Asia and the present climate crisis; and Alexander Nemerov led the audience in a thought experiment illustrating how appreciation of art has shaped his life and thought.

Alexander Nemerov leads the audience in a thought experiment

Masha Gessen answers questions from the audience

Amitav Ghosh talks with undergraduates

In addition to public talks, the speakers offered special seminars for undergraduates from a variety of disciplines, including traditional humanities disciplines, computer science, the life sciences, and more.

42

Programs Open to the Public in 2023–24

(39 In-person, 9 Hybrid/Virtual)

2,241

Attendees Around the World

6,209

Event Video Views on YouTube

This symposium, convened by Peter Szendy (Comparative Literature, Cogut Institute) as part of the Economies of Aesthetics initiative and in partnership with the Department of French and Francophone Studies, brought together four scholars to explore contemporary conditions of image creation and dissemination.
This colloquium invited 12 scholars and authors to discuss ways in which the prevalence of first-person writing in the world today overlaps with a more general trend toward blurring the boundary between truth and fiction. Convened by Timothy Bewes (English) and David Wills (French and Francophone Studies) with Michelle Clayton (Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies) and Kevin Quashie (English).
Convened by Neil Safier (History) through the Center of Excellence, this symposium highlighted the work of historians, literary scholars, anthropologists and sociologists at the vanguard of scholarship on French and Francophone ideas and ideologies of race, Blackness, and the economic foundations of the transatlantic slave trade.
This past year’s Film-Thinking series featured screenings and discussions of three thought-provoking international films: Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” (2019), Roberto Rossellini’s “L’amore” (1948) (a part of the film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour at Brown), and Nuanxing Zhang’s “Sacrificed Youth (Qing chun ji)” (1986).
The Disability Studies Working Group hosted three major public events: Jenifer Barclay (University at Buffalo, SUNY) on cripping the archive, Diana Paulin (Trinity College) on the intersection of Blackness and autism, and Camille Robcis (Columbia University) on the history and impact of the institutional psychotherapy movement.
Throughout the fall, the institute hosted a series titled “Experimental Ethnographies.” Curated by Rebecca Louise Carter (Anthropology), the series emerged from the collaborative humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and emphasized creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance to humanistic social inquiry.
The Political Concepts conference for spring 2024, subtitled “This World,” interrogated fundamental challenges and new opportunities that define the present time. Fifteen scholars gathered to lead discussions around concepts including “cosmos,” “cycle,” “dormancy,” “history,” and “listening.”

Support the Humanities at Brown

The Cogut Institute provides students and faculty at Brown with the resources, infrastructure, and opportunities they need for enriching and innovating in their home disciplines, exploring and cultivating burgeoning fields such as the environmental humanities and artificial intelligence, and becoming leaders whose work reaches across the disciplines to connect with broad audiences.

You can help the Cogut Institute advance Brown’s world-class humanities research and learning. There are space-naming opportunities in the newly-renovated Andrews House that will help us to expand our programming and teaching. A gift in support of these priorities will also contribute to growing the humanities faculty, extending financial support to scholars, and strengthening the curriculum:

  • Humanities Initiative Professorships
  • Interdisciplinary centers and initiatives, such as the Center for Environmental Humanities
  • Student projects, research travel, and training programs
  • Our essential Director’s Innovation Fund

To learn more about how your gift will make an impact, please contact Sarah Santos, Director of Development for Academic Initiatives, at sarah_santos@brown.edu or (401) 863-1894.