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View our brochureThe Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is dedicated to promoting excellence and innovation in humanities scholarship, contributing to scholarly innovation, and engaging the greater community in exploring the human dimensions of significant social, cultural, technological and scientific issues.

The IHR strives to create a dynamic environment for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship and to facilitate collaboration among scholars in the humanities, social sciences and sciences for the purpose of examining issues that challenge and shape individual and collective human experience across time.

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 2009-2010 the IHR celebrates its fifth 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 human rights, Chicana/o art, indigenous languages, catastrophes, tribal government history in Arizona, and gender, sexuality, and the media. 
·        The annual Faculty Seminar Series, now in its fourth year, has drawn several hundred faculty members together to discuss the concerns and methodologies that characterize and distinguished humanities research. This year’s series will focus on the Crucial Contexts the humanities provide for issues of war, human rights, and sustainability. 
·        Our fourth group of ASU and Visiting Fellows will join us in 2009-2010. Each fellow or fellows’ team is working on the theme, Utopias, Dystopias, and Social Transformation. 
·        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 second year, is awarded to an ASU scholar in alternate years. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Department of English, is the 2009 award winner. Bambi Haggins and David Hawkes have received honorable mention.
·        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. 
 
Since 2007, the IHR has devoted much time and energy to the topic of Humanities and Sustainability. In spring 2009, the institute and the Film and Media Studies department at ASU, hosted a film festival and ran a student film competition. Screenings attracted members of the public as well as the campus community. Although the Faculty Working Group on Humanities and Sustainability completed its two-year commitment to bringing humanistic perspectives to the conversation about sustainability in May 2009, the IHR and working group members will continue to be engaged in projects related to sustainability. For example:
·        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 will also be a 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.