Project on Disciplinary Innovation

The Townsend Center invites proposals from faculty (as individuals or in teams) who have an interest in participating in a new project on Disciplinary Innovation in Undergraduate Education funded by the Mellon Foundation. Click here for application information.

The Project on Disciplinary Innovation is meant to invite new ways of thinking about the architecture of relationships among undergraduate courses in the humanities and related fields at U.C. Berkeley. The program is built around several premises: that institutions of higher education have remained surprisingly attached to a grid-like departmental structure for teaching even though cutting-edge research in the humanities has gone in very different directions; that many undergraduates at Berkeley find little coherence in their course programs beyond what they take in the major; and that Berkeley faculty are themselves often unaware of the substantial areas of intersection among courses in different departments.

Rather than generate new programs, interdisciplinary majors, or requirements, the aim of this project is to establish a flexible model for cross-disciplinary education by bringing to light some of the hidden “threads” that connect courses across existing departments and disciplines. Topics or issues pertinent to a range of disciplines will be identified by interested faculty and starred as belonging to a particular humanities thread. Each “thread” will be comprised of a relatively robust number of courses in different departments as well as by some introductory activity and a capstone experience that students may elect. For purposes of illustration, examples of potential course threads are: “Revolution” (which might include courses in History, History of Art, Political Science, Philosophy, French, Slavic Languages and Literatures, EALC, Sociology, and Comparative Literature); “Media” (which might include courses on the history of recorded sound, on printmaking and the history of prints, on the new digital media, on the transition from oral to print cultures, on film and photography, etc.); “Popularity” (which might include courses on populist political movements, on popular culture in its many forms, on the history of popular taste in various fields, and on the spread of literature in the vernacular languages). The possibility of following a particular thread or path of interest, once marked by the faculty, will be an option for undergraduates to choose, not a requirement.

The genesis of the project is described in full here.