Two Arts & Sciences professors selected to participate in National Humanities Center's Summer Seminar

Two professors in the University of Richmond’s School of Arts & Sciences have been selected to participate in the National Humanities Center’s Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminars for Liberal Arts College Faculty. Abigail Cheever, an associate professor of English, and Lucas Izquierdo-Jimenez, an assistant professor of Latin American and Iberian studies, will both attend the seminar “Picturing the Present: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity.”

The National Humanities Center, the country’s only independent institute for advanced research in all branches of the humanities, was founded in 1978 under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Every year, 35 to 40 scholars pursue research projects of their own choosing at the Center. In addition, the Center partners with the Jessie Ball duPont Foundation to host a series of summer seminars for faculty from DuPont Fund-eligible institutions. To be eligible, an educational institution must one of the forty liberal arts institutions or military academies that Jessie Ball duBond contributed to during her lifetime.

“Picturing the Present: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity” will run from May 31 to June 19 and will be led by Terry Smith, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh; Judith Farquhar, the Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago; and Nancy Condee, an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies and the director of graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Seminar participants are expected to read a variety of texts in preparation for the program. Once the seminar begins, participants spend four days per week in session with one day each week reserved as a reading day. Because the seminars are designed to be interdisciplinary, participants will encounter methods, perspectives and vocabularies that contrast sharply with their own specialties. The structure of the seminar is purposefully designed to give faculty the opportunity for intellectual renewal.

Posted February 16, 2009