“Why the Humanities Matter” featuring Jonathan Gottschall (11/5)

The Narrative and Cognition Working Group
of the
Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities
and
Project Narrative
 are pleased to present

“Why the Humanities Matter”
A Mini Symposium

Keynote
“Literature, Science, and a New Humanities”
by

Jonathan Gottschall
Washington and Jefferson College

other participants include:
Frank Donoghue, Sebastian Knowles, Nina Berman,
Paul Reitter, and Frederick Aldama

311 Denney Hall
164 W. 17th Avenue
Wednesday, November 5
3:30 pm

 

Jonathan Gottschall has a PhD in English and teaches at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the author of Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Palgrave 2008) and The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge 2008); he is the coeditor of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern 2005) and Evolutionary Approaches to Literature and Film: A Reader in Science and Art (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). He has published articles in the journals of several disciplines, and he has also written for mainstream periodicals like New Scientist and The Boston Globe.  His studies at the intersection of the sciences and humanities have been featured in articles for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Nature, Science, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Seed Magazine, Scientific American Mind, New Scientist, The Times of London, Der Spiegel, and a couple of dozen other national and international magazines, newspapers, and radio programs.

The working group in Narrative and Cognition is interdisciplinary in scope and thus inclusive of scholars working in literature, comparative cultural studies, media, musicology, psychology, biology, cognitive science, neuro-psychology, evolutionary biology.  The aim of the working group: to explore and come to terms with understanding better how narrative shapes experiences of time (memory) and space (place), as well as how it informs our holographic capacity to determine our existence within time and space; to know better how the mind and its stories informs our capacity to know and make sense of the world. In keeping with this aim, the working group will frequently consider the intersections among cognitive approaches to narrative with those of other approaches, both traditional and emerging. The working group will serve as a venue for interdisciplinary dialogue and discussion among our colleagues (professors and graduate students) at OSU to share and formulate methods and approaches for our own scholarly and pedagogical work.