“I really want to make the case that the humanities are more obviously becoming very fundamental in our world,” says Juliet Floyd, the Bordon Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, who became director of the BU Center for the Humanities (BUCH) on July 1.
Floyd replaces Susan Mizruchi, the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities, who had served as BUCH director since 2016. Floyd says she plans to sustain and build on what Mizruchi did as director, such as supporting faculty research and adding internship opportunities for students.
In 2022, Floyd cochaired a faculty committee with Margarita Guillory, associate professor of religion and African American & Black Diaspora Studies, to expand the center’s 1981 charter. She now assumes leadership of a center that has grown its staff and mission to adapt to an increasingly connected, digital world, where ethical questions about public discourse and artificial intelligence dominate the human exchange of ideas.
The revamped BUCH will focus on three initiatives in order to spark new research. One of them is leadership. Floyd wants to support the development of “strong voices that are trained in the humanities to go out into the world” as leaders in conversations around ethics and meaning in and beyond academia, within public institutions, museums, or corporations.
The second, BUCH’s Digital Humanities Initiative, will support research into new ways to curate, interpret, preserve, disseminate, and analyze human culture and life in all its forms, including new media and popular culture. It will also support research into how to discuss larger ethical questions about digital advancements, such as the potentialities of digital culture for religious and cultural expression, how best to use AI systems like ChatGPT in education, how to think critically about the ethics of speech and expression in engineering platforms, or how best to respond to biases and blindspots built into digital algorithms.
Finally, the expanded charter recognizes the “increasingly transnational and global” nature of the humanities, in the opportunities for funding from abroad, work on intercultural understanding, and scholarship on issues that every nation is grappling with, such as language translation, immigration, gender, and ethics of care.
The humanities are a frequent target of those who criticize the relevance of a four-year college degree, and some universities are eliminating programs to cut costs. But Floyd isn’t fazed by attacks on her field, and even believes they make the case for the importance of humanities.
“Why attack it?” she says. “It shows that you’re interested and concerned about what really matters. It shows that the power of the humanities in educating people in the ways of history, language, culture and the ethics of conversation is very, very important. Education is not only a matter of conveying basic factual information, it is also about the construction of human resilience, perceptiveness, aspiration, and appreciation of the wide variety of ways of thinking, living and speaking. Ethical and philosophical reflection are difficult, and they need to be taught and fostered in light of human history, which the humanities has always had a central role in shaping.”