Dear Members and Friends of the AmerikaHaus NRW e.V., 

We cordially invite you to the lecture: 

"Humanities Research and the Crisis of Knowledge"

with

Prof. Christopher Newfield | University of Carolina, Santa Barbara & Independent Social Research Foundation, London

Tuesday, June 27 at 6 p.m., Room B, IAAK, Regina-Pacis-Weg 5, 53113 Bonn

In recent years, the university has lost much public confidence and some of its own sense of purpose. Its various difficulties have put it in direct competition with three other models of higher education. In this lecture, Prof. Newfield compares four futures for higher education. Using North American literary criticism as his case, he shows that only one of these futures supports professional literary and cultural study. Yet, he argues, the reverse is also true: literary and cultural scholars now need to operate in our institutions as scholar-activists, building the working conditions – particularly full employment for PhDs – that allow our disciplines to address real social demands for the knowledge we produce.

About the speaker: Christopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and is now Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution and is the immediate past president of the Modern Language Association (US).