Centered on Cultures

Centered on Cultures

Rice’s Center for the Study of Cultures Promotes Study of Cultures Across Time, Around the World

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY

Rice News Staff

April 8, 1999

For 12 years, the Center for the Study of Cultures has served as one of the university’s powerful tools for fostering dialogue and the exchange of ideas among the disciplines of the humanities, social sciences and music.

While many universities have centers focused on one area of study, such as the humanities, Rice’s Center for the Study of Cultures (CSC) is an anomaly that draws upon scholars from the School of Social Sciences, the School of Humanities and the Shepherd School of Music.

“There is really no other center I know of that brings together the social sciences and the humanities and has the potential to bring together those two very different ways of looking at similar problems,” said David Nirenberg, director of the center and associate professor of history.

The center, created in 1987 under the tutelage of Allen Matusow, who was then dean of the School of Humanities, has continuously sponsored workshops, study groups, conferences and fellowships, all of which foster dialogue between various disciplines. The first director was Michael Fischer, now an anthropologist on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fischer is credited with laying the groundwork that allowed the center to grow into the institution it is today.

The center promotes the study of cultures across time and around the world, Nirenberg explained. The goal of the center is to provide a forum for the comparative and interdisciplinary conversations that make visible the connections among cultures and the things that divide them.

The center supports research that deepens the understanding of cultures and encourages the exploration of new ways of looking at cultures. Three new programs are strengthening that mission.

The first program will draw in up to six distinguished visiting professors every year for stays varying from two weeks to a semester. These leading scholars are expected to play a substantial role in the academic and intellectual life of students.

Once endowed, the second program will provide $10,000 stipends for three Rice graduate students in their fifth year of study.

Finally, thanks to a $1.475 million grant received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation this month, the center will add three postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and associated social sciences. The postdocs will expand interdisciplinary teaching at Rice, diversify research methodologies, enrich undergraduate educational opportunities, and help train the next generation of faculty in the humanities and social sciences.

The visiting scholars, the postdocs and the graduate students eventually will be housed in the center’s suite in the new humanities building, which is under construction.

Helping the director oversee the center is the advisory board, consisting of James Faubion, associate professor of anthropology; Regina Kecht, associate professor of German and Slavic studies; Edith Wyschogrod, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought; and Robert Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities.

“As one of the advisory board members of the CSC for the last several years, I have been impressed by the range of significant, challenging research being carried out by Rice faculty in humanities and social sciences,” Patten said. “Reading their proposals for papers, books and conferences has taught me a great deal about what my colleagues are thinking and teaching. This information, in turn, has helped me better to understand how my own thinking and teaching intersect with other disciplines and how my students might be receiving a stereoptic, but still in many ways focused, view of humanistic inquiry.”

Programs sponsored by the center have been influential, Patten said. For example, the 1998 “19th Century Geographies” conference combined cutting-edge research with opportunities for fellowship and the exchange of ideas across many disciplinary frontiers.

The geographies conference attracted scholars from around the country and abroad who tackled subjects such as British and American traditions of mapping, exploration and boundary definition. The conference participants stepped outside the political maps to visit issues surrounding cultural uses and metaphors involving architecture, city streets and the human body.

“The resulting volume of essays should make a major contribution to the burgeoning study of the relationships among space, mapping and paradigms of interpretation,” Patten said.

Sometimes a conference develops a life of its own.

The 1996 conference, titled “Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain 1150-1800,” attracted the attention of the director of the Blaffer Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). Realizing there had never been an art exhibit on the subject of the body of Christ, the art director developed an MFA exhibit based upon the conference. The museum also brought in Rice faculty to help with the exhibit and the catalog.

The exhibit attracted an unexpectedly large audience, including many Hispanic visitors, to the museum. Because the show was such a success, the MFA staff approached the national conference of Catholic bishops with the idea of developing a public television program based upon the “Body of Christ.” The bishops approved the idea and have begun raising money for production. Linda Neagley, assistant professor of art and art history known for her study of medieval architecture, and Honey Meconi, professor of music and a scholar of medieval liturgical music, are on the advisory board for the television production.

“That is an example of the kind of layering that sometimes happens,” Nirenberg said. “The center did the first conference, but from that you got the art exhibit, the catalog of the exhibit, the real cultural impact in a Houston setting and then this transformation into a national, more popular media. The hope is that the kinds of conversations we have at the center do have that kind of an afterlife.”

The workshops and study groups are the center’s workhorses for the exchange of ideas. There are 15 workshops and study groups under the center’s umbrella. The study groups address topics such as Central Europe, cultural and social theory, environmental studies, and perspectives on the Eastern Mediterranean. A sampling of the workshops engaged in ongoing conversations include African Studies, Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, the Feminist Reading Group, Judaic Studies and others.

One workshop serves as an example of how the Center for the Study of Cultures can foster and nurture the exchange of ideas.

The Medieval Studies Workshop has its roots in the Rice Medieval Club created by Jane Chance, professor of English.

“I can say quite truthfully for those of us who cover unique fields in departments such cross-disciplinary study groups and programs are essential in fostering dialogue at this university,” Chance said.

She created the medieval club as a result of a conversation with Ronny Wells, professor of mathematics and education, who told her about a weekly mathematics seminar, which he conducted.

“I thought, how wonderful it would be to meet with others who share my interests,” she said.

So she formed her own study group. She began asking local medievalists to give lectures, which promoted research by allowing students and faculty to see current veins of scholarships and encouraged networking and cross-university discourse. But her small group had to find funds where available, book rooms and address all the other minute details associated with putting on an event, whether large or small.

Once the medieval group became an official center workshop, she had access to additional funds that allowed her to offer honorariums to lecturing scholars.

“The point is,” Chance said, “that a university is not and cannot be a real place where knowledge is pursued without dialogue; the [Center for the Study of Cultures] provides that encouragement and opportunity.”

The faculty at Rice face heavy workloads and teaching schedules, Nirenberg said. In recognition of that fact and knowing full well that professors need time to pursue their own research–research that can be brought to bear upon the classroom–the center gives three research leaves each year. The fellowships relieve faculty from teaching duties so they have the luxury to pursue their own research for one semester.

Applicants propose a research project to the center’s advisory panel. The proposals are then reviewed by leading scholars outside of Rice. Two outside opinions are received for each proposal. Then the advisory panel awards three fellowships.

Last spring Chance received a center fellowship, which gave her a semester to finish the second volume of her 700-page book “Medieval Mythography” on which she had worked since 1975.

Chance, who has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and others, said the fellowship from the center “was, very simply, a godsend.”

The center has always provided an arena from which people in different disciplines can communicate with each other, said Thomas Haskell, the McCann Professor of History and director of the center from 1993 to 1997.

By offering a voice to all views, the Center for the Study of Cultures has avoided the uncivil wars of ideas involving postmodernists and their opponents that have ripped apart universities across the country.

“[The center] has fostered communications at a much higher level than other campuses,” Haskell said. “Rice has had a comparatively civilized opportunity to conduct debate open to all sides. That has been very beneficial to the university as a whole. The center lures scholars out of their highly specialized niches and encourages them to listen to other people’s specialties.”

Fischer, Haskell and Nirenberg have maintained that tradition of openness. But what is most important, according to Haskell, is the center’s ability to draw scholars into dialogue with faculty who have opposing positions.

There are four upcoming Center for the Study of Cultures lectures:

Ruth Garrett Milikan, with the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, will talk about “Abilities” at 4 p.m. April 9 in room 303 of Sewall Hall.

Fitzroy Baptiste, professor of history at Oberlin College, will present a lecture titled “The African Presence in the Indian Subcontinent” at 4 p.m. April 23 in room 525 of Fondren Library.

Edward Keenan, professor of history at Harvard University, will give a talk titled “The Lost Continent of Dnieprovia” at 7:30 p.m. April 23 in room 110 of Rayzor Hall.

Dyan Elliott from Indiana University will lecture on “The Discernment of Spirits and the Problema-tization of Female Spirituality in the Later Middle Ages” at 4 p.m. April 23 in Rayzor Hall, room 110.