Michael Bérubé (Penn State): "The Humanities and the Advancement of Knowledge"

In this talk, Michael Bérubé addresses the role of humanities centers and institutes in fostering interdisciplinary humanities research, and ask whether that research is finding a secure institutional home in North American academe. More broadly, he argues that there is no widely accepted, publicly disseminated rationale for new research in the humanities, and that this accounts for most of the discouraging public perceptions of academic work in the humanities.