The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities (CGSH) is one of the research units of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies. Conceived to restore the centrality of the humanities to the study of current social issues, the CGSH facilitates scholars’ and students’ ability to engage with the global community and promotes diversity of knowledge and understanding in an increasingly interconnected world.
Two factors motivated the creation of the CGSH. One is related to the history of the university in the Western World from the Renaissance to the present, and, more specifically, to the recent history of the university during the Cold War. The humanities guided Renaissance intellectuals in their quest to understand their world. Systematic studies of art, literature, and language were also fundamental to the Kantian-Humboldian University that structured intellectual inquiry in the period between the Enlightenment and World War Two. However, during the Cold War, the humanities lost ground in academia vis-à-vis the social sciences, which emphasized the scientific study of society and were founded in the strategically important discipline of Area Studies. In an era of increasing global connectivity, the humanities seemed mired in the habitual paradigms used to study the development of the Western World.
Secondly, after World War Two, the humanities appeared to be increasingly disengaged from social debates related to current events, issues, and problems. During the Renaissance, intellectuals employed the humanities, namely history and rhetoric, to debate issues of social importance. The philosophes of the Enlightenment relied on philosophy to engage in thinking and theorizing about social transformations. Even the emergence of the discourse of political economy in the eighteenth century was within the sphere of the humanities rather than the social sciences. The CGSH hopes to revive this tradition and thus contribute a global perspective to the shaping of the university in the twenty-first century.