Article Archive
Opening Lines
At its inception in 1987, the Townsend Center was envisioned as having the potential to make a profound impact on the intellectual life of the humanities at UC Berkeley. In spite of the fact that Berkeley had a long and illustrious history of teaching and scholarship in the humanities, there was until that time no center to support humanities research or to incubate new programs. Now, nearly 20 years and five directors later, it is hard to imagine what Berkeley was like without the Townsend Center. The Center’s many different initiatives, ranging from the Townsend Fellows and the Strategic Working Groups to the Avenali Lectures, have met with extraordinary success. The Center has provided the intellectual and physical contexts for new work to emerge, it has afforded much-needed opportunities for dialogue among faculty and graduate students, and it has sustained a remarkable level of intellectual intensity and excitement in its programs. The Center has been a great success indeed, and yet there is much more that needs to be done. When asked what it is that faculty and graduate students in the humanities most need in order to accomplish their work, I hear one consistent set of answers: time for research (along with the funding that will allow this time), freedom from the structural encumbrances that often impede the realization of new ideas in an institutional context, space for spontaneous intellectual interchange, and help in achieving a broader recognition of the importance of the humanities on the campus and in the wider world.
The Townsend Center has been of special significance for those faculty and graduate students who have participated directly in its fellowship programs over the past years. For other members of the academic community, the Center has been of occasional benefit through its sponsorship of visiting lecturers, conferences, and talks. In all these areas, as in others, the Center can and should do more to reach a wider base of faculty and graduate students and to help strengthen the position of the humanities in the wider world. I hope that in the coming years the Center can offer increased fellowship and funding opportunities and that it can serve as a physical and intellectual space that is open to all humanists at Berkeley.
Insofar as additional resources are needed to meet these goals, we will have to become more active in fund-raising efforts. We will need to learn how to present the strongest case for the humanities to a non-academic public, and for that we will need to find a language of values that we can endorse. I hope that the Center can sponsor the discussions that will lead to a sharper articulation of those values and that it will be the place where we as a community can test their limits. At the same time we will need to establish new partnerships with non-profit foundations and to identify the projects that meet our common goals. In the process we will be challenged to imagine and invent the ways of working that will help us shape new versions of the “humanities” out of the forms of inquiry we have inherited from the past.
I hope to direct attention toward three broadly defined areas of concern over the next few years and invite your suggestions and proposals about the ways best to pursue them. The first is The Humanities and the Public World. What contribution do the humanities make to public values, and what role can we play in shaping the way people think about the public good? The second concerns the work of Communities of Scholars. How can we invent meaningful forms of interaction in circumstances where the very idea of a “community” seems increasingly elusive? What does it mean for intellectually independent humanists to be working together, and how can we create the collective contexts that will allow our individual work to flourish? Finally, I hope that the resources of the Center will afford an opportunity for us to think about the ways in which the practices of historically informed reading and interpretation can be brought to bear on some of the Critical Dialogues that we need to engage—dialogues about values and interests, about claims over identities, representations, and resources, as well as about what is truth and what is legitimacy—in the contemporary world.
I invite all of you to email, call, or drop by the Center to talk about your aspirations, ideas, and hopes for the Center. I am very pleased to be the new Director, and I hope you will take this missive as an invitation to play an active role in shaping the Center’s future.
Director Anthony J. Cascardi has taught at UC Berkeley since 1980 and is currently Professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. He has served in the past as Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities and as Director of the Consortium for the Arts and Arts Research Center on campus. He has published widely on the relations between literature and philosophy, aesthetic theory, and the literature of early modern Europe. He is currently working on political theory and practice in the writings of Cervantes and on contemporary aesthetics in the tradition of critical theory.