Opening Keynote Lecture – Finding Ourselves: The Humanities as a Discipline

Prof. Geoffrey Harpham, President and Director of the National Humanities Center

In the keynote lecture, Professor Harpham attempts to describe the assumptions, procedures, goals, and effects of humanistic scholarship. His argument is that the humanities in their modern form—that is, the form they have taken in the American academy since the end of the Second World War—reflect a definite concept, a disciplinary specificity that encompasses all the humanities disciplines and distinguishes them from other, nonhumanistic disciplines.

To view the lecture and the slides, please click here.