Consciousness in Interdisciplinary Perspective
Fall 2011 Faculty Colloquium

Reading List and Schedule

This colloquium was a particularly fruitful collaboration. Click here to read the assessment given by its co-directors, Anna Neill and Leslie Tuttle.

What is human consciousness? What precisely do we mean when we refer to perceiving, feeling, thinking, and decision-making? Recent decades of research have restored questions about the nature of consciousness to the scientific respectability they enjoyed more than a century ago, and reopened them to a wide range of disciplinary approaches. Today, the cognitive sciences seek to explain the physical origins of our sense of self. At the same time, humanist scholars who used to conceive of the conscious mind primarily through its shadow, the Freudian unconscious, are integrating the new “thinking about thinking” in their studies of language, narrative, memory, and identity. These new developments, some claim, are nothing short of a “scientific revolution” that will alter our understanding of human nature, and thus remap our disciplinary boundaries.

The Hall Center’s 2011 Fall Faculty Colloquium, “Consciousness in Interdisciplinary Perspective,” will encourage interdisciplinary dialogue about consciousness, which sits simultaneously at the forefront of the cognitive sciences and at the root of humanistic inquiry. Participants will consider how new insights about our evolutionarily shaped human minds might enrich understanding of the classic subjects of humanistic scholarship, such as reading, storytelling, reasoning and believing. At the same time, they will reflect on the flowering of cognitive sciences within a specific environment—liberal, post-war Western science—with its own embedded historical and cultural precedents for making the human “I” an object of study.

Seven faculty members and one graduate student will meet under the leadership of co-directors Anna Neill and Leslie
Tuttle: Sherrie Tucker (Associate Professor, American Studies); Iris Smith Fischer (Associate Professor, English); Mark Landau (Assistant Professor, Social Psychology); Glenn Adams (Associate Professor, Social Psychology); Ann Rowland (Associate Professor, English); Ben Sax (Associate Professor, History); Brian Daldorph (Assistant Professor, English), and Nicholas Simmons (doctoral candidate, Philosophy).

The format will be unique, exploratory and interrogative, with the principal aim being to generate novel ideas for further investigation. Participants will read excerpts from important recent work, engage in interdisciplinary discussion, and eventually produce short, individual or collaborative essays for a collection aimed at a general audience, to be made available through KU ScholarWorks.

All KU faculty and graduate students are welcome to attend Colloquium sessions. Meetings will take place from 9-10:30 am in the Hall Center Seminar Room on the following dates: September 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, October 6, November 3, and December 1 and 8.

Meeting times are subject to change. Please consult the Hall Center’s website calendar for the most up-todate information.

RESPECTABILITY
Fall 2009 Faculty Colloquium

Respectability, like pornography, is difficult to define but we believe we know it when we see it. Despite the challenge a definition of respectability poses for the person on the street, when one turns to scholarship in a variety of disciplines, it seems that a concern for respectability is everywhere -- anthropologists debate the difference between respectability and reputation in the Caribbean, labor historians ask how the working class distinguished itself as respectable, students of African American culture deploy "the politics of respectability", and gender scholars ask if respectability limits or empowers women and men.  Respectability can be embedded in objects like pianos and violated by artists like les fauves. Respectability plots drive English literature from Austen to Dickens and social scientists question the relationship of respectability to class.  In other words, one would be hard pressed to find a field in the humanities of social sciences where respectability can't be fruitfully studied.

Director: Ann Schofield, Professor, American Studies/Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies

The Tree of Life
2008 Spring Faculty Colloquium – A Component of the Creative Campus Project

The Tree of Life crosses diverse cultures and contexts as concept, metaphor and motif, from folklore and religion to science and commerce. As a theme, therefore, the concepts, metaphors and applications of The Tree of Life should be explored across the sciences, humanities and the arts.

Directors: Kris Krishtalka, Director, Biodiversity Institute & Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; and Victor Bailey, Director, Hall Center for the Humanities & Distinguished Professor of History.

Discourses: Theory in the Humanities

Humanities scholars are often accused of possessing a slavish devotion to "isms" and spilling too much ink on theory. In reality, many faculty are rather more theory-averse. For this reason, a number of KU faculty have decided to offer a series of roundtables in the Fall 05 and Spring 06 semesters on some of the most renowned theorists of the past few decades to assess exactly how influential they have been. In each case, a particular work will form the nucleus of the presentation. All the texts under scrutiny continue to have appeal for historians, philosophers and literary critics and are well worth re-visiting.