"The Future University"

This conference announcement deserves wide circulation, I think:

Summary

The current year’s theme will culminate in a major Mellon-funded conference at the end of June 2011: ‘The Future University’ - not ‘the Future of the University’ (over which the new ‘austerity’ looms alarmingly), but its evolving character and changing concerns, especially in the digital age. The conference will address post-disciplinary developments along with policy implications, as well as the catalyst provided by the creative and performing arts on one hand, and the social sciences on the other, when it comes to rethinking the very basis of ‘the Future University’ as a place where education and research (including practice-based research) remain vitally inter-connected within the broad field we know as the Humanities.

Panels will consider musical performance and creative practice, the reorientation of old disciplines in new regions, the relation between universities as they are or might be, and between digitality and democracy, higher education policy and the humanities, the role of ‘the human’ in global literature, and a range of literacies that include both digital literacy and the literate eye in looking at and writing about art. Keynotes will address ‘Digital Technologies and the Conditional University’ (Bernard Stiegler, Pompidou Centre) and ‘The Impact of International History’ (Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy).

The programme will also feature a musical performance event called ‘Improvisation in the Round’, a panel discussion on ‘The Fate of the Humanities’, and a closing panel at the Fitzwilliam Museum on the role of the University Art Museum.

Unfortunately I can't attend, so may never learn about the role of "the human" in global literature.

(Hat tip jules, who is on the mailing list. CRASSH organised an interesting workshop - and poster session - when we were in Cambridge last year.)