Change the Frame

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Welcome to the new academic year! 

In 1999, under the direction of Dean Jorge Hankamer, The Institute of Humanities Research (IHR) was created as a campus center of excellence to support innovative research across the humanistic disciplines. This year marks the 25th anniversary of that formation, which we now know as The Humanities Institute (THI). Over two and a half decades, THI has fostered innovation, inspiration, investigation, and change dedicated to the three pillars of our work — research excellence, student success, and public engagement — and in the process become a national model of how to integrate those efforts while supporting and advocating for cutting-edge humanistic scholarship.

The Humanities have always been integral to the research and teaching of our interdisciplinary and vanguard campus, and so it is especially fitting that THI’s 25th anniversary falls on the 60th anniversary of UC Santa Cruz, a campus founded with the express goal of linking the self and society, and linking academic rigor with just action. 

The Humanities play a crucial role in building those links. At their core, all Humanities disciplines help us change the ways we see society, ourselves, and each other, providing new frames of reference. With the help of the Humanities, we can expand the limits of our perspectives—we can change the frame.

The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz is committed to shaping the future of the field of Humanities—and of humanity itself. Doing so requires a multiplicity of frameworks, ways of seeing, and modes of thinking. Most importantly, it requires connection. The connection of community. The interconnection of disciplines. The spark of new ideas connecting inside our minds.

For 25 years, The Humanities Institute has been helping students, scholars, and community members connect and work together to change the frame. Every event, every research grant, every student fellowship, every partnership and collaboration is an opportunity to show our community and the broader field how the work of the Humanities is impactful, life-altering, and, above all, necessary.

This year is already shaping up to be one in which the necessity of humanistic research and engagement is on full display, as technological, political, military, social, and economic forces continue to urgently raise the question of what we owe ourselves, others, and our shared future. 

In light of this, THI’s theme for this anniversary year is Humanity, an enduring problematic, one replete with histories of foreclosure and of hope, one at once frail and enduring.

Join us this year. Change the frame.

With gratitude,

Pranav Anand, Faculty Director
Irena Polić, Managing Director

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