2015-16 IHC Graduate Affiliates Program (GAP)

2015-16 IHC Graduate Affiliates Program (GAP)

Designed to encourage academic professionalization, the IHC Graduate Affiliates Program will foster a community of graduate student scholars to engage in dialogue around the events of the 2015-16 IHC series The Humanities and the BrainIn the course of the academic year, graduate students will exercise their skills in communicating with scholars from diverse fields about points of intellectual convergence and difference.

The 2015-16 cohort of Graduate Affiliate Program participants will attend at least eight public events in the IHC series, participate in three works-in-progress sessions with other GAP scholars, and serve as panel facilitators at the IHC’s end of year conference. Participants must commit to attending all three works-in-progress sessions, which will be held on the following three Mondays from 3:00 to 5:00 PM: November 9, February 22 and May 9.

GAP scholars will receive a stipend of $750. To apply, please submit a CV and letter of application detailing your interest in the theme to ihcucsb@gmail.com by Friday August 14, 2015.  Please feel free to contact IHC Associate Director Susan Derwin with any questions about this program: derwin@ihc.ucsb.edu.

About the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain:

Seat of consciousness and the unconscious; motor of knowledge, memory, judgment and problem-solving; locus of language and creativity; regulator of movement and emotion; processor of sense perception – the brain reigns sovereign over human cognition and sentience. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2015-16 public events series “The Humanities and the Brain” will explore the workings of the brain from perspectives deriving from the humanities and fine arts, as well as from newer interdisciplinary fields such as neuroesthetics and neuroethics. The program will bring humanists and neuroscientists into dialogue to consider diverse analyses and representations of this most elusive organ. Topics addressed may include:

Artificial intelligence
Autism
Brain injury
Consciousness and the unconscious
Criminal justice and brain imaging
Decision-making
Dreaming
Emotional states
Historical understandings of the brain
Life stages and the brain
Literary representations of mental states
Mapping the brain
Memory and forgetting
Mental health and education
Music and the brain
Narrative and the brain
Performance and the brain
Poverty and brain development
Religious experience and the brain
Representations of the brain in popular culture
Visual arts and the brain