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Being Humans
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Upcoming Events

April 13, 2012
Collaborative Creative Resistance
April 13-15, 2012
Robot Weekend: Being Human Gizmos
April 19, 2012
Erika Doss presents “Picturing New Deal America: Visual Art and National Identity, 1933-1945” as part of the American Art Lecture Series
April 19, 2012
Diavolo, a dance company under the artistic direction of Jacques Heim.
→View All Upcoming Events

Michael Berube, DirectorLetter from the Director

We’ve seen many changes here at the Institute in the past 18 months: we have wonderful new graduate assistants, Kristin Barry (graphics) and Laura March (social media), exciting new programs (“Being Humans,” featuring a postdoctoral position and a wide range of events), and a new website (why, you’re looking at it right now). 2011 was a very busy and successful year for us: the highlight of the year was the IAH Medal ceremony for famed dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor, but our film festivals—one devoted to “Workers of the World,” the other to the career of David Lynch—generated a good deal of interest and enthusiasm as well.

In 2012 we have an embarrassment of riches before us. In April, we’ll be organizing “Being Human Gizmos,” a symposium on the boundaries of the human, inspired by Anthony Clarvoe’s new play, Gizmo. Gizmo is inspired by Karel Capek’s classic R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), and will afford us the perfect opportunity to think and talk about how the representations of (and relations between) humans and robots have evolved over the past ninety years. We’ll also ask about the human/animal distinction, and the intraspecies distinctions drawn by disability studies—and we’ll discuss the implications of the play, and the play-drive, for us humans.

In the fall we’ll help host the Woody Guthrie Centennial; we’ll stage a two-day film festival on the theme of “Adaptation”; we’ll co-host a conference on “The Life and Death of American National Pastimes”; we’ll award the 2012 IAH Medal to novelist J. M. Coetzee; and we’ll put together a conference on the future of graduate programs in the arts and humanities. As you can gather from this agenda, we read the mission of the arts and humanities as broadly as possible—and we are committed to bringing the work of artists and humanities to bear on every kind of discussion of what it means, what it has meant, and what it might yet mean to be human.

But 2012 is a transitional year for the Institute in another way, as well. During the calendar year, I will be serving as the President of the Modern Language Association, the scholarly society that is the professional organization for 30,000 professors of language and literature. (I was elected by the members of the MLA in 2009; I became Second Vice President in 2010, and First Vice President last year.) In the 128-year history of the MLA, I am the first Penn State faculty member to assume the presidency. While I’m holding down that office, Associate Director Dan Willis (Architecture) will be serving as Interim Director, and Hester Blum (English, former director of the Center for American Literary Studies) will be Interim Associate Director. Dan and Hester will be a terrific team, and I am very happy that the Institute will be in such capable and creative hands.

Please check back during the year to find out what we’re doing, and where and when and why—and say hello to Dan and Hester as they guide the Institute through its forty-sixth year.

Michael Bérubé
Paterno Family Professor in Literature
Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities
The Pennsylvania State University

Being Humans

What does it mean, and what has it meant, to be human? What might "the human" mean in the foreseeable and unforeseeable future? These are the questions that animate the arts and humanities– and that will define the work of Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Beginning in 2010-11, the Institute will offer programming devoted to exploring the question of "the human" from all angles.

For artists and humanists, these are extraordinary times: as the fate of our planet hangs in the balance, our sense of "the human" is undergoing remarkable challenges and transformations. How should we understand our relation to animal cognition, to artificial intelligence, to the biosphere, to disability, to prostheses, to genetics? Can research into our evolutionary inheritance actually help us understand how and why we create art and literature? Can we imagine a form of humanism in which the boundaries of the human are unclear and unstable? Artists, performers, and humanists must be central to these debates– and to every deliberation of what it means to be human.

Paterno