9 April 2025
UCD Humanities Institute hosts 'Crisis of the Humanities' roundtable
The UCD Humanities Institute will host a roundtable discussion on the Crisis of the Humanities with Professors Kader Konuk and Vanessa Agnew (Technical University Dortmund), the Director and Associate Director of the (opens in a new window)Academy in Exile.
The Trump administration’s campaign against universities, as exemplified by the threat to cancel major grants to Columbia University, which then bowed to government interference, underlines the speed and scope of the assault on universities and on academic freedom. Direct political and legislative assaults have proliferated, with more than 30 US states having enacted legislation limiting the teaching and discussion of certain topics, such as critical race theory, gender and sexual orientation. At the same time in the UK university management is responding to serious underfunding of the higher education sector by sacking staff, closing humanities programmes and axing Schools of Modern Languages, English, Ancient History, Theology, and Art History -- amongst others. Meanwhile, academic freedom is being eroded across the EU too, as documented by the European Parliament (EP) Academic Freedom Forum.
In this disruptive context, our roundtable broadly examines the crisis of the humanities and intervention responses, featuring the ‘Academy in Exile’ as a case study. Founded in 2017, the Academy in Exile is a joint initiative to support cultural producers and scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and law who are at risk because of their academic work and/or their civic engagement in human rights, democracy, and pursuit of academic freedom. The Academy in Exile is based on a model that creates multidisciplinary cohorts of scholars around a unified theme, with the aim of enabling persecuted scholars to collaborate with one another.
Attendance is free but registration is required. Please register on (opens in a new window)Eventbrite HERE
Professor Kader Konuk, Professor of German literature at the Technical University Dortmund and Director of the Academy in Exile, is a comparatist with expertise in the literary and cultural history of migration and exile. In 2022, she was made honorary professor of the Research School of Humanities & Arts at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on ethnic and religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Turkey, and examines discourses, cultural practices, and disciplinary formations that are shaped by travel, migration, and exile. In 2028, she initiated the ‘Transnational Literary Archive’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Turkish Department. A first of its kind in Germany, the Archive collects transnational literature produced in Germany and provides a framework for conducting research into Germany’s multicultural heritage. Her monograph, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford UP 2010) investigates the relationship between German-Jewish exile and the modernization of the humanities in Turkey. It won the annual prizes for the best book in comparative literature and Germany studies, receiving both the René Wellek Prize (from the American Comparative Literature Association) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) award (from the German Studies Association).
Professor Vanessa Agnew is Professor of Anglophone Studies in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Technical University Dortmund, Associate Director of the Academy in Exile, and Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts’ Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University. Her research interests include: Anglo-German cultural history; Intercultural exchange and knowledge transfer; Postcolonial theory; and Music discourses from the 18th century to the present, among others. Her book Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford, 2008) won the Oscar Kenshur Prize and the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. She has co-curated numerous exhibitions including: Right to Arrive (Canberra, 2018); Fixing What’s Broken (Berlin, 2023); and What We Brought with Us (Re:Writing the Future Festival, 2021; German Literature Archive Marbach, 2022; Goethe-Institut New York and University of Cincinnati, 2023; and Dengê min tê te? Hörst du mich? Festival für kurdische Exilliteratur, Literaturhaus Berlin, 2024). Agnew’s children’s book Wir schaffen das – We’ll Make It (Sefa Verlag, 2021) has been translated into Ukrainian, Arabic, and Farsi.
