12 March 2014, Live-streamed event on "Global Humanities?"

4Humanities.org will host a live-streamed event on "Global Humanities?" on March 12, 2014, noon-1:30 pm Pacific Standard Time. The featured participant will be Rens Bod, professor of humanities and digital humanities at University of Amsterdam, who will engage online with Alan Liu, David Marshall (Dean of Humanities & Fine Arts, University of California, Santa Barbara ), and others at UC Santa Barbara on the question of the humanities and global humanities.

The questions are:
How can we think comparatively about what the humanities mean in multiple areas of the world with educational and funding systems not necessarily commensurable with U.S.-style "liberal arts"?
For example, how are the humanities and arts talked about elsewhere?
How are their histories and traditions different?
How are they positioned relative to other disciplines, institutions, and social sectors?
How are their different functions interrelated--memorial, educational, critical, research-oriented, etc.?
In both the past and the contemporary moment, how are humanities and arts differently valued or challenged around the world?

The event will be livestreamed on YouTube from the event page at http://4humanities.org/2014/02/. Suggested readings from Rens Bod's book and Geoffrey Galt Harpham's *The Humanities and the Dream of America* are available from the event page (request a login to download the readings from Lindsay Thomas: lindsaythomas at umail.ucsb.edu ). For more information, contact rens.bod at gmail.com.