Academic life at the College is most stimulating and engaging when faculty members are brimming with new ideas, debating and sharing them with one another, and revising and extending their teaching and research in light of these fresh perspectives. The Center’s Faculty Seminars are designed to weigh concepts integral to contemporary humanistic inquiry and to examine their strategic usage in cultural and scholarly discourse. The participants—a rotating complement of Haverford faculty selected from many departments across the academic divisions, joined by Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellows—are challenged through wide-ranging reading and discussion to define the activity of humanistic study and to examine the terms by which they justify it. Together, faculty forge an intellectual arena in which the irreducible activity of questioning may be nurtured and reinvigorated, renewing the philosophic courage to test the limits of discourse while exploring the limitlessness of humanistic curiosity. The Seminar's’aim is thereby to generate and disseminate scholars refreshed in their understanding of the competing perspectives that continue to quicken humanistic dialogue, and to enrich teaching, conversation, and research at Haverford in myriad, and often unpredictable, ways.

The Hurford Humanities Center has a schedule of future Faculty Seminars that will be offered through the 2009-10 academic year. Each fall, faculty are invited to apply to join the next year’s seminar if they feel that it might enhance their own research and teaching interests, and afford them rewarding collaborative or interdisciplinary interactions. In addition to offering opportunities to bring the faculty’s research into a wider forum for debate and discussion, each seminar has a broad thematic focus and a shared syllabus of works to be read and discussed. In some years, the theme of the faculty seminar may dovetail with the focus of Center speaker or performance/arts series, and the Center may sponsor additional opportunities for seminar participants to interact with visitors. Seminars meet throughout the academic year, generally twice a month, a schedule that allows both for extensive reading and continuity of focus. Though seminar members share responsibility for crafting a syllabus, the seminars are coordinated by individual faculty members who make proposals to the Center for the seminars they would like to lead. Seminar leaders and participants receive released time and a book allowance for their participation. The seminar leader also receives a stipend.

Seminar for 2007-08
“Photography, Modernism, and Post-Modernism”
an exploration of film and photography in relation to the historical disciplines and other fields
Leader: James Krippner, History
Kim Benston, English
Laurie Hart, Anthropology
Graciela Michelotti, Spanish
Debora Sherman, English
Gus Stadler, English
Christina Zwarg, English
John Muse, Mellon Post-doc Fellow, Fine Arts

Click this link for Mellon Fellow search charge and application requirements.

Seminar for 2008-09
“Seminar in Visual and Textual Technologies: The Illustrated Book”
Co-Leaders: Maud McInerney and Stephen Finley, both of the English Department
Currently accepting applications from faculty to participate.
Deadline: December 7, 2007

Future seminars page

For How to Apply to lead a Faculty Seminar or participate in one, see Faculty FAQ section.