I am happy to announce that the Centre for Humanities Innovation (CHI), Durham University, was launched on May 16 at Durham Castle.
CHI is dedicated to the advancement and circulation of new ideas in the humanities and to expanding the transformative impact of humanistic thinking on social and technological strategies for the future. As you can see on our website, we aim to stimulate debate and foster innovation under several rubrics, and we welcome submissions (in English only) in the following formats:
1. A brief manifesto on the tasks of the humanities.
2. Contributions to Minima: a Journal of Intellectual Micro–Genres. The purpose of this rubric is to restore the intellectual dignity and revolutionary potential of those genres that have been neglected or excluded from academic discourse: aphorisms, theses, manifestos, fragments, etc.
3. Repository of New Ideas. Brief exposition of a new idea (hypothesis), up to 1500 words. This repository should function as a preprint archive for the humanities.
4. Glossary of New Terms and Concepts emerging in the humanities. You are invited to describe terms coined by yourselves or by other scholars and new concepts emerging in humanistic disciplines.
You will find more detailed descriptions of these rubrics and instructions on how to submit your contributions on our website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/chi/
Our planned activities are focussed on several thematic areas, including but not limited to:
1. The tasks and the future of the humanities.
2. Methods and genres of intellectual creativity.
3. The "Third Culture": interaction of the humanities with technological and scientific cultures.
4. Technologies of self–inscription, biography, and metabiography.
5. Heteronymic/hyperauthorial writing, proliferation of multiple writing personalities.
International humanities networks and conferences/symposia on these topics are already in the planning stages; further updates will appear via our blog and mailing lists.
We will be happy to receive your suggestions for further activities and research themes. You are welcome to join our growing intellectual community, also present on Facebook and Twitter.
You are invited to subscribe to our news and updates. Please enter your email address on our blog:
http://centrehumanities.wordpress.com/
