Creating Opportunities for Engagement with the Humanities for Five Decades
Since its founding as an “all-University” program in 1975, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities has sought to mobilize and “cross-fertilize” knowledge from across the university—“whether in the pure sciences, technology, social sciences, humanities or the professions”—in order to address “human problems” of “general concern.” This visionary language in the Kenan Foundation and Mellon Foundation gifts that endowed the Society has guided our work for more than 50 years. To that end, the membership of our Governing Board has included faculty from the Schools of Law, Journalism, Medicine, Public Health, Arts, Climate, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, as well as the humanities and the social and natural sciences.
Building upon the original vision of interdisciplinary teams of recent PhDs and senior scholars in the humanities, sciences, and professional schools, the Society of Fellows remains committed to nurturing postdoctoral fellows as scholars and teachers. In recent decades, we have also expanded our role as a hub for humanistic thinking across campus, whether in our own programming or in collaboration with other units.
In its current form as The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the SOF/Heyman fosters innovative scholarship that brings the critical, reflective, and interpretive practices of the humanities to address interdisciplinary questions as well as real-world challenges beyond the university. Through lectures, roundtables, workshops, conferences, performances, film screenings, and public humanities collaborations, the SOF/Heyman brings together faculty, postdoctoral scholars, students, artists, practitioners, and community members in conversations that illuminate the past, engage the present, steward the future, and imagine new ways to produce and share knowledge for the public good. The Fourth Purpose has always been our purpose.
In keeping with the traditions of reflection, searching inquiry, and vigorous debate that have long characterized humanistic thinking at its best, we seek to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge and the airing of views and perspectives of multiple campus constituencies. The SOF/Heyman may not share the views of all of the speakers at our events, but we are deeply committed both to the university as a space for asking hard questions in the service of forging a better understanding of our world and to fostering the human values of freedom, flourishing, and mutual respect among all members of the communities we engage.
