Humanities, self-knowledge, and our digital times: an interview with Georgetown Dean Christopher Celenza.

Christopher S. Celenza is Dean of Georgetown College and Professor of History and Classics at Georgetown University. He has been Director of the American Academy in Rome and publishes widely in the field of Renaissance studies. He recently sat down for an interview with Humanities Watch to discuss the state of the humanities.

Humanities Watch: What defines the humanities for you (vis-a-vis the social sciences or sciences, or liberal arts, or in general)?

Christopher Celenza: This is a complex question. There is an obvious answer factually (the humanities are the central disciplines of languages, history, literature, philosophy along with the arts), but how do we make the case for them?

While the humanities teach us a great deal about language, it’s important that we go beyond simply aesthetics. I am thinking about the recent scandals involving misconceptions and deceptions in social media and in medical technology.  If CEOs in these fields had spent more time with the humanities in terms of self-reflection about their enterprise, in the Socratic sense of “know thyself,” which is at the heart of the humanities, things could have turned out differently. People on corporate boards too often become entranced by the image of technological change and success, without examining it carefully, without looking for evidence or proof. Social media has become, in many instances, a vector for lies and misinformation. While science deals with facts, the idea of the fact is really the realm of the humanities: what is the nature of “fact”? how do we know what is true? what is the basis of truth? Talking about truth, beauty, and virtue – traditional claims – do not connect with people the way it did 10-20 years ago.

In addition, our habits of reading have changed also in the last 10 or 20 years: there is a “crisis of stability.” Humanities can teach us to read: but how do we read now in our digital times? How do you understand and make sense of the information that surrounds you?

HW: Georgetown is launching new programs in engaged and public humanities and planning to create a new humanities center. Can you tell us what these programs are, and what you see as the mission for the center?

Celenza: Right now, we have the Georgetown Humanities Initiative. We have thought over many years about a humanities center. This initiative is taking shape in an emergent fashion. We began with a town hall that engaged more than 50 faculty. We have found seed funding to support initial projects and we set up a faculty board representing disciplines, along with the library Director. We plan to announce an internal chair this fall.

One project is on the U-Street corridor in DC, preserving the African-American history that includes churches and jazz clubs, and other cultural institutions. This project has both a digital aspect and is in collaboration with Howard University.

Another project is on Buddhism and the Silk Road which brings together departments here of Theology and Religious Studies, History and Art History.

So the purpose is to bring people together, and institutions, and have a local focus, too.

One major part of the Center is the public humanities part. It will allow scholars to present their scholarly work in a more public fashion: through podcasts, opinion pieces, and so forth. We hope it will be the best place for the humanities in DC, with public programs. Faculty are also concerned about ways their research can inform public policy and serve as an important source of advocacy, so the Initiative will create a space for that discussion as well.

It should be a place where humanities scholars can work together (who often work separately), through events and a common calendar. Internally, we plan for it to have a vertical nature as well: among students, graduate students, and faculty. It will take money for space and projects. We would like faculty to be able to invite scholars to Georgetown for a semester, and the Center would also support a longer-term project among faculty. The biggest promise is the reciprocity between scholarly work and public humanities: we will be better able to talk with the outside world, something we haven’t done well in the last decades.

HW: Are the humanities “in crisis”? What would define that crisis?

Celenza: The problem is that humanities have not been able to show the importance of their work to a larger audience.This is a problem, but a lesser one, in the sciences. The criticism of the humanities as narrow-minded has a long tradition – think of Aristophanes’s portrait of Socrates – but it has gotten more severe.We need to show how the humanities can foster greater introspection and self-knowledge, through applied practice using texts and artifacts: I am thinking of the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf’s work Proust and the Squid, and more recently Reader Come Home. She has studied how spending time online has made us less empathetic; and she recommends that we do “code-switching,” taking advantage of the digital domain while cultivating more “long-form” reading. The goal is longer honest self-reflection.

There is a publishing crisis, too. What counts as academic publishing? Digital publication allows for broader visibility and there needs to be a better understanding of the criteria for its evaluation.

HW: What should scientists or business graduates know about the humanities, and vice versa?

Celenza: It’s important to be informed: there are drivers of the economy that we need to understand and acknowledge. We often live in separated and siloed worlds. Yet Silicon Valley and venture capitalists have come around to examine the role of ethics in our lives and work.

 HW: How does your scholarship in the Renaissance inform your views on the state of the humanities today? I am thinking both about your monographs – for example, The Lost Italian Renaissance and The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, as well as about your biographies on Machiavelli and Petrarch designed for wider audiences.

Celenza: I had reached a point after my first projects to ask about the field I was in, and that led to the Lost Italian Renaissance, and thinking about the ways 19th-C. intellectual history shaped the study of the Renaissance. It led me to move around and explore new projects, so I undertook the Machiavelli and Petrarch biographies to push myself in new directions. I am paying as much as possible to my writing, and avoiding specialized words to reach a wider audience.My administrative work, for example as Director of American Academy of Rome, also brought me to talk about complex ideas with people from various backgrounds, who weren’t specialists.

What I realized when writing the more general books was that I needed to think about the interests about people outside our field, and to consider them as non-specialists who aren’t focused on historiographical arguments or definitions. This is also true for teaching, for example teaching young undergraduates who do not know, or are not interested in, the scholarly debates on a given subject. One has to uphold the interplay between specialized research knowledge and the place of one’s audience.

HW: As a related question, do you have any recommendations for humanities scholars about writing for the sake of the humanities?

Celenza: I think it’s critical to connect: there are many vectors to do this. There is a wide ecosystem of the web, for example Sarah Bond at the University of Iowa, who’s connected to many people through the internet about classical studies and the classical heritage. She also has developed a distinctive personality on Twitter. In addition, there is a real need for public lectures, for example the One Day University program. Ultimately, as humanities scholars we should engage in greater self-reflection about our language, and be conscious about different registers when addressing various audiences. This has been, and still is, Aristotle’s message for us.