Global Humanities Institutes
An Initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Back to Program OverviewSince 2012, CHCI, supported by the A.W. Mellon Foundation, has advanced multiple forms of international, collaborative research designed to foster new knowledge and new networks. Building upon the first phase of this project (2012-2017) and with the support of a new grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, the CHCI Global Humanities Institutes represent the second generation of international collaborations, implementing a structure that refines strategies tested during the past five years in which CHCI took on the transformative project of supporting collaborative research.
CHCI Global Humanities Institutes are multiyear projects devoted to a research theme, method, practice, or problem in the humanities that would benefit directly from an international, collaborative approach to it. Research will be undertaken by a team of scholars representing at least three humanities centers or institutes, preferably located in three different world regions. The apex of each collaboration will be an in-person meeting of the Institute, flexible in format, that will last approximately two weeks and include both members of the convening research team and approximately 15 additional participants affiliated with CHCI member centers. Participants in the institute should include scholars across career stages, including graduate students and early-career scholars.
Pilot Phase (2017-2019)
In the pilot phase of this program, CHCI had requested expressions of interest from member centers and institutes from all parts of the world who wish to undertake projects related to two broad themes: “Challenges of Translation” or “Crises of Democracy.” Out of seventeen expressions of interest received (nine on "Challenges of Translation" and eight on "Crises of Democracy"), the CHCI International Advisory Board selected two projects.
The first project, "Translation's Theoretical Issues and Practical Densities: Violence, Memory, and the Untranslatable," was 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. 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. This group held their first planning meeting in Oxford in May 2018 with a two-week institute taking place in Santiago, Chile in July 2019.
The group is now working on a forthcoming publication organized by the GHI leaders at the University of Chile.
The second project, "Crises of Democracy through the Prism of Cultural Trauma," was 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. This project will include partners at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. This group held a planning meeting in Dublin in May-June 2018, and a two-week institute in Dubrovnik, Croatia in 2019 with a follow-up meeting in São Paulo, Brazil.
Following the two-week institute in Dubrovnik, the team created a website to house all of the content generated at the GHI in Dubrovnik and completed a documentary about the Crises of Democracy GHI using footage and interviews filmed in Dubrovnik. In 2019, they debuted an open syllabus on the crises of democracy that is freely available. They leaders are working to expand the scope of the project and secure funding to ensure maintenance of research networks through a grant from the European Union’s Research and Innovation program Horizon 2020.
Second Round (2018-2020)
In 2018, CHCI invited humanities centers and institutes to propose their own themes for the next round of CHCI Global Humanities Institutes, building on the insights of the developing pilots to plan and host Institutes for the summer of 2020.
Three additional institutes have now been held: “Migrant Workers, Global Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context,” held in Taiwan in June 2021; “Chronic Conditions: Childhood and Social Suffering in Global Africa” held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in August 2022; and “Climate Justice and Problems of Scale” held in Pretoria, South Africa in July-August 2022.
Renewal and emphasis on Inclusive Collaboration (2021-present)
In 2022, CHCI launched a new cycle of the Global Humanities Institutes, with an emphasis on inclusive collaboration, and selected two projects: “Post-extractivist Legacies and Landscapes: Humanities, Artistic and Activist Responses” and "Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and the Imagination of Just Futures."