"A Future University Without Humanities?"

Monday, May 5, 2008
6:00 p.m.
Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street
(please check the lobby monitor for lecture room location)

Sponsored by the Department of German of UW-Madison,
with financial support from the Hilldale Fund.

Reception beginning at 5:30 pm will precede the lecture
in the lounge area outside the auditorium.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Stanford University

The academic “Humanities and Arts” have long been successful intransforming discourses on their own “crisis” into a seemingly pleasant mode of survival. But what if, finally and “out of the blue,” this discourse referred to a real peril within in the present and looming future environment of the academic world? This is the opening for a reflection that will try to assess – with sober detachment rather than in apologetic tones – what contemporary societies and cultures would lose if, this time, the “crisis of the Humanities” were truly life-threatening. It is of course possible that the courage to ask such questions in a serious way will produce the reward, in the end, of a less pessimistic view of the “Humanities and Arts.”

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University, teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, and (by affiliation) German Studies, Modern Thought and Literature, and Spanish and Portuguese. He is also Professeur Associé in the Département de Littérature Comparée at the Université de Montréal, Directeur d’études associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Professeur attaché au Collège de France. His main areas of teaching and research are the histories of French, Spanish, and Italian literatures (especially the Middle Ages, the 18th century, and the first half of the 20 century); the history of Literary Criticismthand the Humanities; and the history of western thought since its classical origins. He has held many visiting professorships and lectureships around the world, and for 2009-2010 he has accepted a fellowship at the Siemens Foundation, Munich. Professor Gumbrecht is the recipient of various teaching awards and honorary degrees and since 1998 he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 1989 Gumbrecht has been convening the “Philosophical Reading Group” (a Mellon Workshop of the Stanford Humanities Center), and in1991 he initiated the work of an interdisciplinary research group that has since organized conference series around the topics of “Medieval Theatricality,” “The Medieval Senses,” and “Medieval and Modern Religion.” His over one thousand publications (translated into more than twenty languages) include a history of Spanish literature, a chronicle of the year 1926, and monographs on medieval narrative, rhetoric in the French Revolution, Zola, “Presence,” philology, and the aesthetics of sport.