About us
Founded in 2024, the Global South Humanities Initiative (GSHI) seeks to highlight the vital contributions of geographically and racially marginalized communities to the study of the humanities writ large. We host events with scholars from (and of) the Global South, maintain a postdoctoral fellowship, and offer lecture series, conferences, and other activities in partnership with leading universities and research institutions overseas. Our program is invested in exploring the wide spectrum of actors and historical processes that have shaped both humanistic culture and the languages in which it travels, embarking from the premise that the study of the humanities necessitates contending with the many interlocking structures of power that created the modern world.
The GSHI is envisioned as a clearing house of ideas for JHU faculty and students whose work in the humanistic disciplines leads them to ask fundamental questions about the humanities in a global context. How should we rethink the traditional methods and goals of the humanities in light of the complex and conflicted history of their development and dissemination? What can scholars in North America learn from humanistic practices in the Global South? And what new forms of humanism could such rethinking facilitate? We support the development of humanistic thought that will critically engage a global present witnessing the widespread rise of racism, xenophobia, majoritarianism, and violence that continues to separate the Global North from the Global South.
People
Aamir Mufti is the Ralph S. and Becky G. O’Connor Professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Mufti’s resolutely comparative and interdisciplinary work attempts to rethink some fundamental concepts and categories of the Western humanities—the secular, the minor, the cosmopolitan, the exilic, the border, migrant and refugee, the Anglophone, the world—from the perspective of colonized and postcolonial societies and populations. He is a scholar of the history and legacies of the British Empire in South Asia and of the crises contained within the so-called Jewish Question in Europe since the eighteenth century. How the figure of migrant impacts the project of European unification is one of his main preoccupations at the moment, in a book project called Strangers in Europa.
Alessandra Amin, Postdoctoral Fellow
Alessandra Amin is a historian of modern art in the Arab world, focusing especially on questions of migration, exile, gender, and sexuality in painting and graphic design. Between completing her PhD (UCLA, 2022) and arriving at Hopkins, Dr. Amin was the Ibrahim Abu Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow in Palestine Studies at Columbia University and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, looks at the dream and the maternal body as nested modes of relating to Palestine in the visual and literary arts of the revolutionary period (1965-1982).
Contact
For general information about the initiative, contact us at [email protected].
To get updates about our events and activities, subscribe to our mailing list.
Events
- There were no results found.
- There were no results found.