History

The Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin was established in 2001 with start-up support from the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, and Communication and the School of Law. The Institute's founding objective, consistent with that of humanities centers at other universities, was to facilitate cross-disciplinary inquiry, collegiality, scholarly collaboration, and innovation among University faculty and graduate students. This objective prompted the establishment of the Humanities Institute Seminar, in which selected faculty and graduate student Humanities Institute Fellows meet weekly to explore multi-disciplinary aspects of and approaches to a broad annual topic or theme, and the Distinguished Visiting Lecturers Series, in which distinguished scholars from other universities are invited to campus to deliver a public lecture and to meet in seminar with Institute Fellows.

From its inaugural year, however, with the development of the Texas Teachers as Scholars program and the award of a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation grant to launch it, the Humanities Institute began to envision and implement a more expansive and democratic mission: to design and promote public humanities and community partnership programs that actively involve diverse public constituencies and put scholars as citizens and citizens as scholars into mutually rewarding dialog. Through its array of innovative educational programs, research support initiatives, cultural events, and public forums—often developed in partnership with community, government, and arts organizations—the Institute currently makes a substantial contribution to the intellectual life of greater Austin. It also stands among the leaders of the national trend to bring civic and intellectual engagement with local communities from the margins to the center of the university's mission.