Sweet the Sound
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Farewell remarks by outgoing CHI director Darryl Harper
I would like to thank Catherine and Michael for their support of the CHI, their support of me in my role here, and their support of all of us doing humanities work at the college. The work has gotten harder (and scarier) over recent years. And this is true regardless of our disciplinary homes. Having a Provost and a President who are each passionate about humanistic inquiry is not something I take for granted. Catherine and Michael light up when they talk about this work. You can see it in their body language, hear it in their words, through the inflection in their voices, and you can see it in the college’s financial and other material commitments. It makes a huge difference, and I am grateful to you for it.
I realized as I was introducing last week’s CHI Salon that the CHI is actually being refounded–starting over in almost every way we can imagine: not only with a new cohort of research fellows, but also with a wonderful new director (Chris Grobe), a new program coordinator, and even a new facility.
I step away from this directorship with gratitude for the many connections I have made with colleagues across the college. What a privilege it has been to occupy this space, here in the library, designed to sit outside departmental interests, and to bring colleagues together around big, important questions about our humanity. I have had the opportunity to bear witness to one mind-blowing program after another; to learn about your work and your passions: our colleagues in exile from their home countries who have put nothing less than their lives on the line to do this work; those who have sat on the cutting edge of Open Access publishing and have helped to shape a worldwide movement to make knowledge more accessible; those thinking through artificial intelligence, treasuries of emotion, up and coming writers in the Lusosphere, why and how we migrate, indigenous knowledge, exactitude in architecture, film histories. And that’s just a sample!
Thank you to the CHI Advisory Board: Martin Garnar, Rafeeq Hasan, Maria Heim, Sheila Jaswal, Emily Potter-Ndiaye, Austin Sarat, Femi Vaughan, Niko Vicario, and Jane Wald. And thanks to those past Advisory Board members with whom I have served. Thanks for all your work in support of the CHI.
I have taken a moment at every salon to thank my colleague Triin Vallaste, the Program Coordinator for the CHI. And now I want to thank her for a year of exemplary service to this center as she moves on to become Senior Coordinator for Academic Department Support at the college.
And finally, let me recognize the CHI Fellows--Ashlie Sandoval, Trent Masiki, Watufani Poe, Anaiis Cisco, Rose Lenehan and and Janice Yu--who are now coming to the end of their term. The CHI Fellows have worked under the theme “Black Here and Now” where they have come together across disciplines to investigate questions of race, and specifically the Black experience. They hosted a fabulous symposium last month in conjunction with Presidential Scholar Saidiya Hartman's residency with panels responding to Professor Hartman's work, Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, and Black Visuality.
If the Center for Humanistic Inquiry has a sound, it is a sweet one.
May 3, 2023