Thursday 30 June 2011 - Saturday 2 July 2011
Location: Law Faculty, University of Cambridge

The current year’s theme at CRASSH culminates in a major Mellon-funded conference at the end of June 2011: ‘The Future University’ - not ‘the Future of the University’ (over which the new ‘austerity’ looms alarmingly), but its evolving character and changing concerns, especially in the digital age. The conference will address post-disciplinary developments along with policy implications, as well as the catalyst provided by the creative and performing arts on one hand, and the social sciences on the other, when it comes to rethinking the very basis of ‘the Future University’ as a place where education and research (including practice-based research) remain vitally inter-connected within the broad field we know as the Humanities.

Panels will consider musical performance and creative practice, the reorientation of old disciplines in new regions, the relation between universities as they are or might be, and between digitality and democracy, higher education policy and the humanities, the role of ‘the human’ in global literature, and a range of literacies that include both digital literacy and the literate eye in looking at and writing about art. Keynotes will address ‘Digital Technologies and the Conditional University’ (Bernard Stiegler, Pompidou Centre) and ‘The Impact of International History’ (Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy).

Participants include:

Danielle Allen (Princeton), Eric Clarke (Oxford), Nicholas Cook (Cambridge), Cathy Davidson (Duke), Debjani Ganguly (ANU), Michael Kenny (Sheffield), Joseph Koerner (Harvard), Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara), Chris Newfield (UC Santa Barbara), Cathy Porter (MLA), Sir Adam Roberts (British Academy), Simon Schaffer (Cambridge), Joseph Slaughter (Columbia), Bernard Stiegler (Pompidou), Nigel Thrift (Warwick), Megan Vaughan (Cambridge) and Marina Warner (Essex).