To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Humanities Conference in Los Angeles, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Inclusive Museum Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
For information on sharing photos with Flickr, please read more here.
Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing by Yahia Lababidi is now available from The Humanities imprint.
There are at least three aspects of this collection of essays which are both singular and superb. First, not surprisingly, the prose is incisive and yet evocative; Lababidi moves from the aphoristic and the epigrammatic to the suggestive, the lightly hinted, the nuanced, with impressive ease. This is a rare gift, more associated with European writers than with American. This striation of tone, of register, of mood, gives a sense of surprise to his sentences; they spring back to the touch. Sometimes they even seem surprised at themselves.
Secondly, Lababidi covers a huge range of subjects. From Nietzsche to belly-dancing, indeed! What is impressive, however, is not so much the range itself as the aplomb with which he disports himself there. Kafka, Kierkegaard, Montaigne, et al., rub shoulders with Michael Jackson and “Ramadan TV.” But I like the fact that he don’t blur distinctions either. These writers or entertainers are treated on their own terms. I’m not a fan of Michael Jackson, or of Susan Sontag, for that matter, but Lababidi persuades me to an unexpected sympathy with them, at least while I’m reading his essays. The ability to reveal or to create affinities is the secret gift of the greatest essayists, in my view, and Lababidi does this impressively often in Trial by Ink. There is also a finely calibrated sense of the absurd, the whimsical, the slyly surrealistic throughout. And this has the unexpected but quite genuine effect of strengthening and emphasizing not only the literary but the moral seriousness of the essays.
Finally, there is something which is difficult to express: this book has a distinctive flavour, the unmistakable flavour of a sensibility. This unites the essays, however disparate in topic. But this “taste” is what draws the reader into the book and entices him from one essay to the next. The book becomes an exploration on which the reader embarks. This is one of the elements in collections of essays I most appreciate–this secret invitation au voyage which the author holds out–and Lababidi does this extremely well–with courtesy as well as cunning. The reader is like Bartleby (in my favourite of these essays) who prefers not to but here is persuaded otherwise.”
—Eric Ormsby, author of Ghazali (Makers of the Muslim World)
From David Brooks at The New York Times…
Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.
Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.
This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. More…
The Ninth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities will be held at the Universidad de Granada, Campus La Cartuja, Granada, Spain from 8-11 June 2011.
Thank you to all of those who contributed to the 2010 Humanities Conference, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. The conference brought together delegates from many backgrounds and discipline areas, continuing the conference’s commitment to inclusive dialogue.
Both delegates who attended the conference and virtual delegates may upload their presentations and videos to the Humanities Conference YouTube channel. (Information on uploading your presentation available here.) You may also be a part of our Common Ground YouTube community by joining the conference group and becoming a subscriber (click on the yellow “subscribe” button in the top left corner of the screen).
Additionally, please join our online conversation by subscribing to our monthly email newsletter and subscribing to our Facebook, RSS, or Twitter feeds at http://thehumanities.com.
It is no doubt that the 2011 Humanities Conference will continue on the momentum and successes of this year’s conference, and we are pleased to be hosting the conference in Granada at the Universidad de Granada. Please continue to check the conference webpage, newsletter and blog for further information and conference announcements at http://thehumanities.com/.
From The Times Higher Education…
Never invite a zombie to meet the vicar. They are simply an embarrassment, shuffling around in a most unpleasant manner, mumbling when spoken to and with the disconcerting habit of having bits fall off into the cucumber sandwiches.
If you must invite one of the not-quite-deceased to take tea with a member of the clergy, let it be a vampire - always a much safer bet. Yes, I know they used to have a disturbing habit of arriving as a bat and feasting on the nearest jugular, but they’ve moved with the times. Since their makeover courtesy of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer, they are as tame as pussycats and will sip their Earl Grey with the best of them. Just remember, vampires are the undead, but zombies are the living dead - an important little point of etiquette. There’s always the werewolf option, but there’s still the problem of the full moon and pet insurance. Just don’t invite a zombie.
Now that vampires are girlie and romantic, only a zombie will do for all those ghoulish thrills. Michael Jackson danced with them as long ago as 1983 and they didn’t do his career any harm. At the Grimm Up North! horror film festival held in Manchester last year, dozens of enthusiasts wearing torn clothes, green make-up and fake-bloodstained faces moaned and stumbled their way to the box office to get their horror kicks. More…
2011 Humanities Conference
Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
8-11 June 2011
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2011 Humanities Conference registration options.
From Alan Kirby at The Times Higher Education…
Postmodernism is dead. Wail and rend your clothes. Postmodernism is dead. The tyrant is vanquished!
Can the rumours be true? Can postmodernism, the darling of the humanities for a quarter of a century, really have departed this world?
Who says postmodernism is dead? Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, for one. For him, the term is “now almost completely discarded”.
Scholars who a generation or so ago built their careers on explaining the meaning of postmodernism now tell us the game is over. Linda Hutcheon, the Canadian literary critic, whose 1988 book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction became a standard text, now calls it “a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past … Let’s just say: it’s over.” The Egyptian-born critic Ihab Hassan, who pioneered the study of postmodern culture in the 1970s, explored similar territory in a recent paper, “Beyond postmodernism: toward an aesthetic of trust”. And the American architectural theorist Charles Jencks, whose 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture helped popularise the term, now believes that postmodernism came to an end around the turn of the millennium. In fact, as the American literary critic Andrew Hoberek says, “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. They are everywhere … but are they true? More…
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