The Humanities, Today and Tomorrow

UC Irvine School of Humanities Public Discussion Forum

Ian Baucom will host a public discussion on the current state of humanities and future directions. He will talk for about 15 minutes as an introduction to a public conversation with UCI faculty, students, and staff. 

Ian Baucom is the Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute and Professor of English at Duke University. He works on twentieth century British Literature and Culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999, Princeton University Press), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005, Duke University Press), and co-editor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (2005, Duke University Press). He has edited special issues of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic Studies and Romanticism, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life. He received his PhD from Yale University and taught there before joining the English Department at Duke. Prior to assuming the post of FHI Director, he was Chair of English for three years.

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the UC Irvine Dean of Humanities and the Taskforce on Reconstituting the School of Humanities.