Graduate Lecture by James Turner

—> If you plan to come – please notify us through Facebook (www.facebook.com/GraduateSchoolofHumanitiesVU), or email (FGW Graduate School graduate.school.fgw@vu.nl)

In this lecture, James Turner will discuss the formation of the modern humanities disciplines in British and American universities. This occurred in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lecture will briefly discuss the uniqueness of modern disciplinarity and some long-term contexts for its development. This will set the stage for a hypothesis suggesting that graduate education was a historical pre-condition for humanities disciplines actually to form.

Professor James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the History Department &History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Notre Dame. He is an acclaimed author of various books on the history of the humanities and academic discipline formation. In his last publication, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities Turner explains how philology – once the queen of the human sciences – did become little more than an archaic word. His book is acclaimed as “a monumental and capacious achievement, a career work”, and “a fascinating forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university.”