Leading educators from Eastern Europe will gather at Yale for thefirst conference ever held on how to teach the humanities in a post-Communist world. Titled "Curricular Development in the Humanities:1945 to the Present," the conference will take place July 29-Aug. 10 atthe Yale Center for International and Area Studies in Luce Hall, 34Hillhouse Ave.
Some of the 22 participating scholars have been jailed for their political opposition to Communist repression in the past. Now in positions of power, they are coming together to learn how American universities in general and Yale in particular deal with the issues thatchallenge the humanities.
"Our own so-called crisis in the humanities is nothing compared to the crisis in Eastern Europe," says Michael Holquist, professor of comparative literature and Slavic languages and literatures and chair of the Council on Russian and East European Studies. "National literary tradition, language, and history are all being recreated in the newly formed countries. Since these are the materials for constructing a newnational identity, these people have a chance to make a real differencefor the future," he says. Professor Holquist and Cyrus Hamlin, professorof German and comparative literature and chair of the Germaniclanguages and literatures department, are serving as the academicdirectors of the program.
For decades, the Soviet Union dictated to the universities within its sphere what to teach and how to teach it. Today, educators in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, the Slovak Republic, and Ukraine are setting the course for themselves, notes Professor Holquist.
The program will explore the approaches American academics have taken to the humanities since World War II, beginning with the development of general education and progressing to new criticism, the growth of American studies and other area studies, the rise of literary theory, the relationship between literature and other arts, the link between science and the humanities, and how the humanities interact with the public sector.
"This conference will have an impact that extends far beyond thetwo weeks of seminars," says Professor Hamlin. "We don't have any agenda to impose; we want to create a space for reflection on alternatives at a time when decisions are being reached that will last for decades." The scholars who are coming from overseas to participate in the concert include Beata Klimkiewicz, Slovak-born television commentator and faculty member at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland; Dumitry Ciocoi-Pop, rector of Lucian Blaga University in Romania, poet, philosopher, and journalist; Jacek Holowka, rector of the University of Warsaw; as well as other department heads, deans, universitypresidents, and deputy ministers of higher education. Yale participantswill include Professors Gaddis Smith, Alan Trachtenberg, RichardBrodhead, Vincent Scully, Robert Shulman and Peter Demetz.
The humanities conference is one of nine summer institutes organized by the International Center at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and the only one taking place off site. Established four years ago to bring scholars from Eastern Europe and the West together, theInternational Center is a consortium of 18 universities from nine countries.
The conference is sponsored by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Council on Russian and East European Studies, and the Tubingen University Internationales Zentrum, with additional contributions from the Beinecke Rare Bookand Manuscript Library, the Chopivsky Family Foundation, and the Kempf Memorial Fund.