From The SNF Agora Institute’s Youtube / Published 2/11/22 Dean Celenza, author of the new book, The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400–1800, […]

In times of crisis, when we face complex challenges like global pandemics, we need a collaborative response that transcends disciplinary boundaries and offers novel approaches to vexing problems. In the current moment, biologists, engineers and others in fields with established pipelines for translational research have sprung into action, working together to create life-saving diagnostics and therapeutics to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet it isn’t always so obvious how scholars in the humanities can contribute to the front-line response.

On March 6, 2020 an international group of artists, writers, and art historians gathered in Baltimore, MD for a workshop at Johns Hopkins University, Form Beyond the Aesthetic, exploring the politics of form. After talks by Milette Gaifman, Benjamin Anderson, Jennifer Stager, Allison Caplan, Yael Rice, and Sonal Khullar, the group visited the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Hope Mohr Dance performed extreme lyric i. This performance engaged with the fragmentary poetry of Sappho, the only female poet from ancient Greece whose work survives.