Mission
The Humanities Research Center fosters scholarly research and intellectual community in the humanities broadly understood, facilitates scholarly work between the School of Humanities and other areas of Rice University, and leads institutional change by partnering with other foundations, centers, research institutions, and universities. The Center strives to bring a dynamic element to research and teaching by developing "intellectual liquidity" within and between Humanities and the sciences, information and communications technologies, and the professions.
Furthermore, the Center serves as the nucleus within the University where the disciplinary changes that will shape its future can be profitably reflected on and anticipated. For a university the size of Rice, these collaborations--both within the university and beyond it--are crucial to stimulating innovation and new research. In short, the Center is an agent of intellectual integration, within and beyond the School of Humanities.
History
Since its establishment in 1987, the Center has contributed substantially to the growing vitality of the humanities and culturally oriented social sciences at Rice. Center research groups and workshops have fostered the kinds of collegiality among faculty and collaboration across departments and disciplines that are so crucial for innovative work in this field. In addition, the Center's internal fellowship program has granted 63 semester-long fellowships of teaching release to faculty in order to facilitate their research. Further, Center-funded guest lectures, symposia, and conferences bring between 80 and 100 scholars to campus per year, providing the national and international intellectual exchanges that are crucial to excellence in scholarship and teaching.
The Center's main programs include Postdoctoral Fellows supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation; Graduate Seminars sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation; NEH & Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Professors; Internal Faculty projects, designed to foster current faculty interests; a Public Humanities Initiative; and fellowships for graduate and undergraduate students. This year, the Center is funding five leaves, eight workshops, and six large-scale conferences, as well as numerous individual speakers and panels organized through the workshops. Through such activities, the Humanities Research Center has become a primary venue for the advancement of scholarship and teaching.
The HRC has completed a faculty exchange agreement with the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, designed to enhance professional developments and to promote international relations. In spring 2006, Elelwani Farisani was in residence at the Center.
