About

about the IHR

The Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) generates and supports transformative, transdisciplinary, collaborative, and socially engaged humanities scholarship that contributes to the analysis and resolution of the world’s many challenges. IHR scholars explore such issues and concepts as sustainability, human origins, immigration, and natural disasters and utilize historical, philosophical, and creative perspectives to achieve a deeper understanding of their causes, effects, and cultural meanings.

Major programs include:

1. IHR Fellows Program
2. IHR Competitive Seed Grant Program
3. Events including lectures, seminars, and research workshops
4. Research Clusters
5. IHR Annual Distinguished Lecturer

In 2010-2011 the IHR celebrates its sixth year. Over those years, our major programming activities have yielded impressive results.

• More than 1,000 people have attended presentations by IHR Distinguished Lecturers.
• Research Clusters and Seed Grant projects have hosted more than 30 events including conferences, seminars, and external guest speakers. This year, cluster and seed grant teams will explore a wide range of topics, including social media, diaspora, immigration and migration, humanistic aspects of post-tragedy responses, interdisciplinary approaches to emotions, and human rights. 
• The annual Faculty Seminar Series, now in its fifth year, has drawn several hundred faculty members together to discuss the concerns and methodologies that characterize and distinguished humanities research. 
• We were joined by our fifth group of ASU Fellows for 2010-2011. Fellows will work on the theme The Humanities and Human Origins. 
• External proposals in excess of $6 million have been submitted since our launch. In 2008-09, those proposals yielded three successful NEH summer seminars and institutes.
• The IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award, now in its third year, is awarded to an external scholar in alternate years. Collaborations across the university have blossomed. IHR-sponsored research has resulted in publications, new knowledge, and ever more interesting analyses of compelling social issues from a humanities perspective. 

• The IHR is funding the Whole, Local, Slow Arts and Humanities seed grant for 2009-10, a project that examines sustainability and food production.
• We are also funding a a research cluster that will examine alternative ideas of sustainability and human flourishing and a seed grant, whose PIs are in the College of Law, that aims to design a legal system that can deal with issues of sustainability.
•  In summer 2009, two NEH Summer Institutes related to IHR projects on sustainability and the environment were offered. 
• The IHR was also co-sponsor of the World Wide Views public forum on global warming.
• The IHR will join other members of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes in designing and producing a video resource for humanities and sustainability/climate change/the environment that will be available for member centers and institutes to use for local programming on Earth Day 2010. We are also involved in creating a national web site on humanities and the environment. IHR Director, Sally Kitch, is co-chair of the steering committee for this CHCI initiative.