Habitat for Humanities

The Syracuse University Humanities Center is based in the historic Tolley Building.

For 25 years, religion professor Ann Grodzins Gold has traveled to Rajasthan in northern India and observed the lives of the people there. Her study of their rituals, culture, tradition, and environment has resulted in four books, written from an anthropological perspective. While she teaches religion courses in the College of Arts and Sciences, she’s also a professor of anthropology, director of the interdisciplinary South Asia Center in the Maxwell School’s Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and a member of the interdisciplinary EnSpire committee that promotes collaboration on environmental research between faculty members at Syracuse and the SUNY College of Environmental, Science, and Forestry. Her current research concerns origin tales and miracle tales at shrines to regional deities in rural Rajasthan, whose healing powers are linked to protected landscapes and natural beauty.

Literature professor Beverly Allen has degrees in Italian and French and has won many awards for her translations from the Italian. Her scholarly interests extend beyond Italian poetry, however, to terrorism, feminist theory, and human rights. Ten years ago, after a visit to Bosnia and Croatia to learn about war atrocities, Allen began regular visits to the war zone to document war crimes against women. Her book Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, published in 1996, has been credited by some with influencing the U.N. Security Council decision to make rape a crime against humanity in international law. In addition to serving on the board of the Maxwell School’s interdisciplinary European Studies Center, Allen teaches courses in Italian and comparative literature and film, and this fall, a new course, “Genocide and the Humanities.”

In addition to their international interests and interdisciplinary scholarship, the two College of Arts and Sciences professors share something else in common: they were both chosen by College of Arts and Sciences Dean Cathryn Newton as William P. Tolley Professors in the Humanities for 2005-07, charged with organizing activities that mentor junior faculty members and foster dialogue across humanities disciplines.

“Professors Allen and Gold exemplify interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities, which is particularly relevant as we renew our commitment to the humanities at Syracuse, both through traditional disciplines and new efforts to transcend institutional and intellectual boundaries,” says Dean Newton.

That interdisciplinary spirit is the driving force behind the new Humanities Center, one of the most exciting initiatives in the humanities in Syracuse University history. While the humanities have always been a cornerstone of an SU liberal arts education, the Humanities Center will bring interdisciplinary humanities activities to the forefront of the campus, both figuratively and literally.

The Center, scheduled to open in 2007, will be housed in the former Tolley Administrative Building, which stands at the entrance to campus. Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s designation of the building for the creation of a new Humanities Center embodies her desire to place academics at the physical—and intellectual—center of the University.

“The Chancellor’s gift is both substantive and symbolic,” says Dean Newton.

In an age when a university education is increasingly viewed as job preparation, the humanities provide a foundation to help students answer the fundamental questions of their lives. “The humanities help student develop critical literacy, providing a sense of history and a consciousness of the struggles for justice and power that characterize conflicts on the local, national, and global levels,” says Susan Wadley, professor of anthropology and associate dean for curriculum, instruction, and programs. “In a world characterized by intense struggles over power, justice, values, and meaning education in the humanities is vital to providing our students and our community with a sense of humanity that allows us to have a vibrant exchange of ideas.”

And increasingly, these complicated questions are best answered through a collaborative approach. At Syracuse, the Humanities have traditionally included the departments of Classics; English and Textual Studies; Fine Arts; Languages, Literatures and Linguistics; Philosophy, and Religion, Creative Writing; and the Writing Program. The College is also home to a number of interdisciplinary humanities programs, including Women’s Studies, African-American Studies; Judaic Studies, Native American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Latin American Studies, Linguistic Studies, and Religion and Society. Scholarly research in the humanities is also conducted by faculty in the social sciences, and increasingly, faculty members from different departments are working together outside of any formal structure, finding multiple perspectives beneficial in many kinds of research.

That’s really the point of the Humanities Center--to explore connections between humanistic thought, public life, and social change, and to develop interdisciplinary research in the arts, languages, literature, philosophy, religion and other fields. “Syracuse joins a very prestigious group of universities that have humanities centers,” says Beverly Allen, including Cornell, Williams, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.

While the concept of a humanities center in itself is not new, the College of Arts and Sciences is breaking new ground in creating a center that transcends the institution.

“It’s going to be the center of a whole lot of activity that is going to connect us to the world beyond the Ivory Tower, at the local, regional, national level and beyond,” says Harvey Teres, associate professor of English and chair of the College’s Humanities Council. “It will be a place where academics and nonacademics come together to do research, put on programs, lectures, performances, conferences, symposia. It’s not about sharing our knowledge with the outside world, but generating knowledge based upon the interaction between academics and the outside world to revitalize humanities both on campus and in the community at large.”

Collaborations across institutions are also being explored, including the creation of a “Humanities Corridor,” in Central New York, essentially a partnership between humanities departments at Syracuse University, the University of Rochester, and Cornell University.

“Together, we can create programs that are stronger than any one of the individual institutions might do by themselves,” says Gerry Greenberg, associate dean of humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Proposals are currently under review by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities that would fund the Humanities Corridor, the development of various interdisciplinary programs (such as a program in religious journalism, a joint effort between the College of Arts and Sciences and the Newhouse School), and humanities fellows.

Extensive renovation to the historic Tolley building is already underway. According to John Osinksi, senior project manager in the Office of Design and Construction, Tolley will retain many of the historical details that make it such an integral part of the University landscape. “Outside, we’ll return to the traditional look the building had in the 1920s and 1930s, without the ivy, which will improve its resistance to weather and age. Inside, much of the traditional millwork will be retained, as well as details like the grand staircase and rich, warm finishes,” he says.

When complete, the Humanities Center will house offices for the directors of the interdisciplinary programs, meeting and seminar space, reception areas, a humanities library, and approximately 20 additional offices that will rotate among humanities faculty. “Just the physical proximity will increase faculty members' knowledge of one another's work,” says Ann Gold, William K. Tolley Professor in the Humanities. “It should create new modes of intellectual exchange.”

The building will also incorporate some ultra-modern features to emphasize its purpose as a learning and teaching space, including state-of-the-art distance learning classrooms, wired to connect in real time to anywhere in the world.

Plans are already in the works for joint language classes—Turkish and Polish; Tamil and Bengali—co-taught simultaneously by professors located at SU, Cornell, and Rochester, with students from all three institutions participating.

“These language agreements could be a model for other initiatives,” says Gold. “The Humanities Center will open all kinds of possibilities for students. We’re breaking down boundaries—between disciplines, between the university and the community, and between institutions.”

Not just breaking down boundaries but building bridges.

“I think we’re uniquely positioned to make a major national breakthrough in terms of connecting the campus to the larger community,” says Teres.

Part of that has to do with the University’s unique location in Central New York, the historic home of the Underground Railroad, the Women’s Right’s movement, the Burned Over districts of the 19th century religious movements, and the Haudenosaunee nation. “It’s an incredibly interesting location in terms of the humanities,” says Wadley. “Over time, we’d like to play off our locale as a place where humanities scholarship is fundamental in some way.”

And then there’s unbounded enthusiasm. “I have no doubt that the Humanities Center is going to become a vibrant hub of brilliant work in the humanities that reaches across the hierarchy of traditional divisions to create new realms of inquiry that will benefit us all,” says Allen. “Not just academic discourse, but the life of the community as well.”