Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

For the past two years, we’ve been debating why we should trust science. At the same time, some, especially in and around the university, have been arguing that we need the humanities now more than ever to help us reason about our politics and values. But why are these two different endeavors? How did questions of moral value and common goods get handed over to the humanities, while questions of trustworthy knowledge given to the sciences? This talk will consider how and why the humanities and the sciences were cordoned off into separate domains with the rise of the modern research university—and the how this late 19th-century division continues to shape our universities and our lives together.

Chad Wellmon is a professor of German studies and history at the University of Virginia for lecture based on his recently published book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (co-authored with Paul Reitter). Wellmon was also the co-director of UVA’s New Curriculum, and, with Andrew Piper and Mohamed Cheriet, leads The Visibility of Knowledge: The Computational Study of Scientific Illustration in the Long Nineteenth Century.