The NYU Center for the Humanities is pleased to announce the launch of Cross/Currents, a new Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab for the 2021-22 academic year.
The Cross/Currents H-Lab will bring into dialogue the environmental humanities and migration studies, with an emphasis on race, diaspora, and indigeneity. The Lab Team has outlined three main trajectories for its investigations around the notion of Cross/Currents: mobility, transmission, and flow. The Lab’s ultimate purpose is to decenter an anthropocentric and imperialistic understanding of global interconnection and exchange.
The Cross/Currents Lab Team states:
“The faculty and graduate students who form part of the Cross/Currents H-Lab are excited to embark on this interdisciplinary experience together as we work to develop new lines of research and inquiry that interweave a study of migration and the environment with the arts and humanities. We are especially grateful to our team of graduate students who have energized our discussions with their original project and teaching ideas.”
The H-Lab model is unique in the Humanities in so far as it leverages the various kinds of exchanges – both formal (organized discussions, presentations of work-in-progress) and informal (shared readings, open bookshelves, whiteboards) – that lab spaces make possible, in order to produce rigorous, engaged, collaborative, public-facing scholarship. Humanities Labs are also unique in the immediacy with which they integrate research and curriculum, bringing of-the-moment research into both graduate and undergraduate classrooms.
H-Labs are funded by a generous grant from Dr. Georgette Bennett in honor of Dr. Leonard Polonsky CBE.
The Center for the Humanities is currently accepting proposals for Humanities Labs to run the 2022 calendar year.