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The Townsend Center at 20
When the Townsend Center was established at Berkeley, 20 years ago this fall, there was an urgent need to foster interdisciplinary work in the humanities and a great sense of excitement about doing so. Indeed, one of the Center’s initial goals was to find ways for Berkeley to develop the kinds of cross-disciplinary efforts that were surging to the forefront of academic life in the humanities and related social sciences. Berkeley’s individual departments had long-established reputations for excellence in their individual fields, and some of Berkeley’s faculty had taken the lead in establishing new cross-disciplinary directions in areas ranging from English to philosophy, but there were few institutional opportunities to pursue the kinds of interests that crossed departmental lines.
On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, it seems fair to say that the Townsend Center has come of age. It has, in fact, helped shape the landscape of interdisciplinary work in the “human sciences” at Berkeley. While the campus is still organized around an administrative structure that is drawn along departmental lines, cross-department appointments are increasingly common and the number of interdisciplinary programs has grown considerably. To divide literature from history has long seemed artificial; increasingly, it has seemed equally strange to separate such things as music and politics, religion and the study of cultural practices, or philosophy and cognitive science. Whether in the form of the designated emphasis at the graduate level, as a graduate group, or as an organized research unit or center, interdisciplinary work allows humanists to focus on questions that are not simply “outside” established departments but which, in some cases, are excluded by departmental interests. One might think of popular culture, aesthetics, or the study of human rights in this regard.
And yet there remains much to be done. Thanks in part to the work of entities like the Townsend Center, cross-disciplinary work has grown to the point where a new set of questions has to be raised, questions about the long-term viability of this tandem structure of departments and centers, questions about the administrative “overhead” costs to faculty, and questions as well about a broader transformation of intellectual life that would incorporate curricular change. The Center’s new Project on Disciplinary Innovation, now being launched in conjunction with the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Cambridge universities, seeks to do just that by creating new curricular and research constellations from already existing materials. (Click here for more information about this project.)
With the inauguration of the Forum on the Humanities and the Public World last year, the Center has also turned its attention to the role of the humanities in the wider world. Our aim in this series is to correct the widespread idea that the humanities have little bearing on the “actual” world, and to do so both by encouraging faculty to articulate those connections conceptually and by exemplifying them in practice. The forum has presented humanists like Robert Pinsky, U.S. poet-laureate and creator of the national Favorite Poem project, whose work crosses directly into the public sphere; public figures, including Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, whose interests include the study of narrative models for public service; and major figures in the arts, such as pianist and author Alfred Brendel. For the coming year, we will present an exciting and ambitions lineup of speakers that will include Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Hilton Als, drama critic for The New Yorker, Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton, and Robert Lepage, director and playwright. It is my hope that these efforts and others like them will contribute to the intellectual vitality of the humanities at Berkeley and beyond. (Click here for the Forum schedule.)
The range of our programs and activities, from the Townsend Fellows to the Conference and Lecture Grants to the Strategic Working Groups, is far wider today than might ever have been imagined by the group of forward-looking humanists who began the Center back in the mid-1980s. Thanks to my predecessors in the directorship—Paul Alpers, Randy Starn, Tom Laqueur, and Candace Slater—and to the ongoing support of current dean Janet Broughton and former dean Ralph Hexter, the Center rests on solid footing. Chief external benefactors like the Avenalis, the Koshlands, and the Geballes have made our work possible even in times of budgetary strain. Together with Associate Director Teresa Stojkov, we have recently completed a reorganization of office space and staff that will allow us to carry a dynamic agenda into the future. But when all is said and done, the Center’s mission remains very much what it was in 1987: to support the faculty, graduate students, and (insofar as proves feasible) the undergraduates in the humanities at UC Berkeley in the development of their ideas and aims. Our chief effort is one of “in-reach.” Our conviction is that, given the resources and opportunities, the Berkeley faculty will continue to produce work of great imagination, inventiveness, and importance for the humanities. Our graduate students and our undergraduates, and ultimately the world at large, will be the beneficiaries of these efforts.