The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton (IHUM) is a home for new experiments in an ancient enterprise. In collaboration with the departments, IHUM offers a joint Ph.D.; sponsors courses, often team-taught, that are open to all graduate students at the University; and hosts an annual conference, regular workshops, and interdisciplinary reading groups. Our courses and events explore the widening possibilities for humanistic study in a young millennium, reaching out to the arts and sciences and testing the conventions of intellectual exchange.
This site offers information on our programs and an accumulating archive of our experiments.
Events 2012-2013
February 6: Summertime. A gathering of the disciplines to listen, think, and talk about George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and its seventy-seven year history, with Daphne Brooks, Steve Mackey, Tracy K. Smith, and Michael Wood. With an open call for voiceovers.
April 2: Inventing Abstraction. A panel discussion of the exhibition at MoMA, with Yve-Alain Bois, Brigid Doherty, Michael Jennings, Susan Stewart, Dmitri Tymoczko, and curator Leah Dickerman. Moderated by Hal Foster.
May 3: The Secret Life of Plants. An embassy to the second kingdom, in which we ask what we are to the plants, and the plants to us, with the help of scholars, artists, gardeners, and cooks.
Events 2011-2012
December 12: The 24-Hour Book. A symposium on the reception of Brian Dillon's 24-Hour Book, featuring contributors to a new collection of (very) recent essays in response. An experiment in the radical compression of culture.
April 5: Pay Attention! Shigehisa Kuriyama will consider questions of tension and attention in view of the new technologies of scholarship, when text is fused with image and sound, and readers are as likely to swipe screens as turn pages. A talk and practicum.
April 19: Our Literal Speed. OLS is a performance project combining collective activity, self-reflexive examinations of the art world’s public life, and a concern for art’s movement through institutional and technological mediation.
April 25: Manifesto Slam! Three-minute manifesti on matters of urgency, from members of the graduate and faculty communities. Judges Martin Puchner and Simon Critchley. A summit of our convictions, with reflections on the form.
