Welcome to the Humanities Research Center at Rice University
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 the university, and leads institutional change by partnering with foundations, other centers, research institutions, and other 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 the University's 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.
New At the HRC
09/20/07 Fellowships Announced
The HRC is pleased to announce the following fellowships. Please follow the links for details on the fellowship programs and applications information.
Internal Faculty Fellowships
Individual Research Fellowships
Collaborative Research Fellowships
(Deadline October 17, 2007)
External Faculty Fellowships
(Deadline: November 19, 2007)
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctorate Fellowships
(Deadline: December 10, 2007)
07/25/07 Public Humanities Initiative
This year, the HRC inaugurates a program that presents important speakers to public audiences, addressing matters of broad humanistic concern as well as public interest. We will invite the Houston community to the Rice campus for lectures and discussions on a wide range of topics, typically organized each season by an overarching theme.
Mexicans Look at Mexico
In partnership with the Latin American Initiative at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, the HRC presents a series of public lectures by leading public intellectuals and governmental figures from Mexico. Speakers will address topics including the oil sector, poverty and development, the fine arts, and security. The goal of this series is to enhance cross-border collaboration and understanding between Mexico and the United States. For more information, please contact HRC Richard Gilder Americas Fellow Moramay López-Alonso.
Houston and Katrina
This series will present speakers addressing the impact of the mass migration of New Orleans to Houston.
07/13/07 New Mellon Seminar
James Faubion, Professor of Anthropology, will lead the HRC's seventh Mellon Seminar, entitled Religious Biopolitics: Transcendental Hygienics Past, Present and Future.
Seminar Description: In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault traces the clinical and psychoanalytic pastoralism of what he calls the biopolitical "anatomo-politics of the human body" in large part to a Christian confessional that he characterizes as being then and as still being "the general standard governing the production of true discourse about sex." The concepts, disciplines and domains of intervention that Foucault includes within the broader Western European universe of biopower suggest that it has its most purely extra-ecclesiastic realization in nineteenth-century France. There, the church and its clerics are remarkable for their absence. Across the Atlantic, however, the universe of biopower takes a different turn. Its expansion in Europe and in America has the same impetus--the cholera epidemic of 1832. A good many physicians are among its American executors, but its great popularizers are with few exceptions ardent Christians, though sometimes Christians very much of their own cloth. The focus of the research that I will develop in the Mellon Seminar, what I call "religious biopolitics," thus belongs to the history of the refractions of the modern apparatus of governmentality as they mingle with the voluntarism, sectarianism and pragmatic utopianism of an America that has long interposed between the individual body and the general population its ever fissile array of Protestant congregations--which it has exported and continues to export widely around the world.
07/12/07 HRC Rice Faculty Fellow Receives Prestigious National Science Foundation Grant
Claire Bowern, assistant professor of Linguistics and HRC faculty fellow, has recently received a grant from the NSF to further her research on changes in ancient Australian language. For more information about this grant and Dr. Bowern's research, click here.
05/17/07 New Book
Steven Crowell, Mullen Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and coordinator of the History of Philosophy Workshop, co-edited a volume of essays Transcendental Heidegger, comprising essays originally delivered at an HRC-sponsored conference at Rice in spring 2003, “Heidegger & Transcendental Philosophy.” The book was recently released by Stanford University Press. Crowell’s co-editor is Jeff Malpas, Professor of Philosophy at the
The Humanities Research Center is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Humanities Arts Sciences and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), and the National Humanities Alliance (NHA).
