International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs | Directory of Programs, Centers, and Projects

The Humanities Center

Johns Hopkins University

The Humanities Center is a small group of scholars, intense and driven, but also, and crucially, enthusiastic and generous. Collaboration, exchange, and intellectual freedom are the core of the Humanities Center’s purpose. It also has its own Ph.D. program and students work in close collaboration with departments throughout the humanities and the social sciences.

Faculty and graduate students at the Center share a commitment to philosophical questions, engaged in art, literature, film, and history, as well as philosophy proper. Because faculty and students work in a variety of fields, a common investment in intellectual curiosity, flexibility, and open-mindedness, as well as to careful reading and criticism, is essential to the coherence of the Center.

The diversity of interests in the Center in turn constitutes one of its main strengths: colloquia in the Center bring together resources from diverse disciplines, and generate feedback from scholars approaching the material from a variety of backgrounds. Thus the Center functions significantly to expand the range of resource material and critical perspectives available both to its own students and faculty and to scholars from other departments who regularly attend the Center’s programs. Its inherent interdisciplinarity allows the Center to serve as a crucial meeting ground for scholars from across the university’s humanities departments, particularly as students and faculty of the Center develop strong ties with those in other departments working closely to their areas of interest.

The essence of the Humanities Center’s interdisciplinarity lies in its emphasis on ideas and problems. The Center’s graduate students benefit particularly from this mode of intellectual engagement, as they are encouraged to seek out a project addressing authentic philosophical/theoretical problems without the restriction of disciplinary conventions. The Center thus fosters a great deal of independence in its graduate students, not only in their coming to their dissertation material, but also in their taking the initiative to develop working relationships with faculty in other departments and often other institutions in the course of their research.

Contact Information
Hent de Vries, Director and Russ Family Chair in the Humanities

Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street, Gilman 213
Baltimore, Maryland
United States
http://humctr.jhu.edu/
humanitiescenter@jhu.edu
(410) 516-7619

Region
North America

Year Established
1966