The Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory is a new research entity jointly promoted by the University of Virginia, Duke University and the University of Bologna. It is conceived as an intellectual space for scholars coming from different research fields and geographical regions to work together on the redefinition of the humanities in a global age.
The Academy is predicated on the assumption that the humanities and the interpretative social sciences need a global perspective in order to break down the “methodological nationalism” that has dominated them in the past and to envisage new interpretative categories.
Such an approach to the humanities and interpretative social sciences also implies a radical intermingling of different disciplines, traditions, and fields of critical thought, from critical marxism to postcolonial studies, cultural studies and feminism, among others. In this view, a global perspective and critical theory are reciprocal: critical theory requires a global perspective, while the study of the global world implies the development of new theoretical frameworks and categories.
The Academy is transnational in focus, facilitating the network and circulation of people and activities in different spaces. The Academy is based at the University of Bologna, but it serve as a hub for the creation and the clustering of transnational networks of scholars from different institutions. These institutions include both the founding members and affiliates that we will build over the next three years
The goals of the Academy are:
• To promote educational experiences such as the Summer School
• To promote the growth of inter-institutional research groups on themes of wide interest, including research projects on social movements and social protests, visual and communication studies, political concepts, health humanities, and digital humanities, among others.
• To promote symposia, conferences, publications, short term residencies, and Humanities Laboratories.
• To design and promote innovative programs that integrate critical theory with a global perspective using new theoretical frameworks and interpretative categories.
See also the Director's public presentation at FHI