Initial Projects Chosen for Global Humanities Institutes
The CHCI International Advisory Board has recently selected two projects to advance to the initial phase of the Global Humanities Institutes program. The first project, "Translation's Theoretical Issues and Practical Densities: Violence, Memory, and the Untranslatable," will be co-led by Pablo Oyarzún and Andrès Claro at the the Center of Studies in Philosophy, Humanities, and the Arts at the University of Chile; and Jane O. Newman, Liron Mor, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o at the Humanities Commons, University of California, Irvine. The second project, "Cultural Trauma and Crises of Democracy," will be co-led by Jane Ohlmeyer at the Trinity College Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin, Nebojša Blanuša at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Citizenship and Migration at University of Zagreb, and Laura Izarra at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo.
These projects emerged from seventeen expressions of interest from CHCI member organizations and partners as a response to a call posted in August, 2017. In that call, CHCI asked potential partners to respond to one of two themes: “Challenges of Translation” or “Crises of Democracy.” Ultimately, there were nine teams who submitted on the subject of translation and eight who submitted on crises of democracy. These two selected projects will serve as pilots for the next round of proposals, which will be posted later this year for Institutes to take place in 2020.
The Global Humanities Institutes represent the newest phase in CHCI's ongoing effort to advance international, collaborative research in the humanities. That project began in earnest in 2012 and 2013 with our “Integrating Humanities across National Boundaries” grants, which gave rise to several formative CHCI projects. In this current phase, CHCI aims to build on the lessons learned from those projects and explore new models for for collaboration among humanities centers in multiple world regions.
The project on "Translation's Theoretical Issues and Practical Densities" plans to hold their first planning meeting in Oxford in Spring 2018 with a two-week institute taking place in Chile in 2019. Additional key partners in this project include the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation program based at the Oxford Research Centre in Humanities (OCCT-TORCH) and the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
The project on "Cultural Trauma and Crises of Democracy" will hold a planning meeting in Dublin in early 2018, followed by a two-week institute in Croatia in 2019 with a follow-up meeting in São Paulo, Brazil. This project will include partners at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
Additional news and information that will develop out of these centers will appear on the program page.