The arts and humanities—essential to the Brown experience

What can students learn through the arts and humanities that will help them understand the world today and provide them with the critical thinking skills and tools to create a better future?

In today's world, especially with AI, there's so much focus on getting an answer as opposed to the process of learning and the process of thinking. In our arts and humanities courses, there are no shortcuts to get to the answer because it’s not about the answer. The process and the thinking is the outcome.

Students get the full range of the process from figuring out what an interesting question is, to looking at documents that are relevant and understanding what other people have said about the topic, and making their own argument. This is how they create their own argument, and they train in the process of thinking through research, thinking through writing, and then thinking through either verbal or written argumentation and critical engagement with their peers. 

This ties back to the principles of the Open Curriculum. The important thing that happens at Brown is the discovery of knowledge in a community and in collaboration with the staff, faculty, and students around you. And so the relationships that students make are not just about networking, but about learning how to think together. It's not just a team-based project where you're coming up with the right answer. It is a team-based project where students learn to have an ongoing relationship and ongoing conversation over multiple months with their fellow students. And the small size of our arts and humanities classes allows faculty to mentor students in the development of those relationships. 

In terms of research, we have a working group in Cogut on disability studies. Whereas disability studies in most schools is very much focused on the present day, Brown’s group is studying disability in the ancient world. They're questioning how disability has been thought about during different periods in history and how that plays out in art, athletics, and history. 

Thinking about distinctive approaches to the creative practice, our non-fiction writing program includes workshops on personal medical narratives and climate anxiety led by Kate Schapira MFA'06, an associate teaching professor of English. These courses focus on understanding how changes in the world relate to changes in the student’s own lived experience.

How would you characterize the role the humanities play in understanding the power of artificial intelligence and its responsible use? 

The humanities are always providing us ways of answering—not the answer—but ways of answering the question about what is the appropriate, ethical way to behave in a particular situation. I would say that many of our humanities classes, by focusing on history, context, relationships between different communities and people, are helping students not just make an ethical decision about how to use a particular piece of technology in a specific situation but are helping us understand the way in which technology interacts with our communities. 

One of the challenges with AI is understanding what it means to be human, and what it means to use technology; what it means to interact with technology, and what it means to interact with a human versus interacting with an AI agent that could appear human. The heart of humanistic study is the continual questioning of what it means to be human.

One of the things that I love about Brown is our focus on positive impacts in our local community and in the larger world. A lot of that is imbued in many of our humanities classes. Those classes help students think about the role of technology, including AI, but also other technologies in changing the health of a community, changing income inequality, changing how well the community is functioning. 

It is the arts and humanities that give us a way of short circuiting that rush to the answer and help us sit with ambiguity and sit with the process. And that will always balance the speed of technological innovation to improve things with the slowness that's necessary for people to think together about the impact of that technology. 

Brown is known for its collaborative ethos. What are some ways that you see arts and humanities faculty and students collaborating with other departments? 

Sam Birch, a planetary scientist in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS), is teaching a course with a staff member from the Brown Arts Institute. Students are learning about current space exploration while also creating original works of art to represent that exploration. It gives students a way to apply ideas and information from one area and to express or show those ideas through creative skills and techniques developed in their arts practice. 

The first “lab” at the Cogut Institute is co-led by Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. This wide and varied set of activities brings together students and faculty across fields to study how to situate AI in a history of transformative technologies, and the connections between AI models of intelligence and other models across scientific and humanistic fields.

A more traditional example is a reading group of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates who get together to read classical Chinese literature and analyze it from a literary, religious, and historical perspective. This group integrates across the communities on campus and across many disciplines that study pre-modern China. 

The Cogut Institute for the Humanities has had such an impact at Brown since its founding in 2003. What’s happening at Cogut now that everybody should know about?

Across many of our humanities fields, faculty are thinking about how the academic world engages with the public and how we share the knowledge that we have with the public and also process feedback from the public. 


Cogut’s initiative on the Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies is directly engaging those questions, because interdisciplinary ethnic studies as a field or fields—Black studies, American Indian studies, Asian American Studies—all came out of the civil rights movement in the second half of the 20th century, as ways of engaging with the world, engaging with the public, and having a dialogue between academic knowledge and public impact in the world. 

Models-Scale-Context: The AI and the Humanities Lab is the inaugural humanities lab within the Cogut Institute. This is a new model for the humanities. Historically, humanities fields are very monastic. You have an individual scholar sitting in a room, reading books and writing. But Cogut inspires scholars to be collaborative and to work together. The humanities labs are explicitly integrative, in the sense that multiple faculty leaders from different fields integrate postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates into their research. 

It is the opposite of a scientific lab in that they are not trying to discover the answer to a specific question. They are trying to figure out what all the questions are and all of the ways in which AI can and should intersect with the humanities.

And what’s new at the Brown Arts Institute? In what ways has it grown and evolved in its first five years?

The Brown Arts Institute (BAI) has experimented with a variety of different ways of engaging our community in appreciation of the artistic practice. What we're doing now is focused on providing intentional opportunities for students to create and perform and produce and curate world-class artistic practice and to interact with world-class artists. 

These opportunities are scaffolded at multiple levels, from casual low-cost-of-entry activities to professional-level projects for people who are arts concentrators. There are 30-minute drop-in artistic activities in between classes, as well as opportunities for individual students or student groups to submit proposals to stage performances or gallery shows in some of the amazing spaces in The Lindemann Performing Arts Center, the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Bell Gallery, or the Cohen Gallery. 


We've developed a number of structured ways for students to engage in a curriculum of courses that could not be offered in departments, including courses on careers in arts and nonprofits. In the BAI’s ongoing Ruckus Sessions, artists, researchers, and cultural leaders visit for a short period of time. In this way students can have that direct exposure to the work that the artist has produced or the research that they have conducted, and be part of a conversation on the creative practice.  


And this all goes to our overarching goal for every Brown student to have an artistic, creative experience before they graduate.

Can you talk about how the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women sparks connection and collaboration among faculty, students, and staff?

The work of the Pembroke Center helps us all understand changes in society through understanding how those changes affect men and women differently. This scholarship ranges from archaeology and anthropology that looks at agency of women and other groups in the ancient world to studying the historical creativity and resilience of queer communities. 

The Pembroke Archives holds a variety of materials on important Pembroke and Brown women and other important feminist leaders. And with the renovation of Pembroke Hall, those archives are fully accessible now for use in teaching and student projects. Multiple times every semester, the archivist will visit classrooms with materials to show students how the archive can be used and how students can see this history themselves and ask questions of the history. 


Another great example of how Pembroke integrates archival work and teaching is through its signature Pembroke Seminar, which brings in scholars from other schools. Every year there's a different topic of focus. This past year, in line with the 250th anniversary of the United States, a political theorist is leading a seminar on: Memorialization and Monuments. 

The Brown Annual Fund launched the Humanities Fund last year and more than $458,000 was donated by alumni, parents, and friends. What are some projects or initiatives on the horizon that will be supported by this fund?

What an amazing level of support for the Humanities Fund in its launch year! 

These donor-provided funds will be dispersed directly to academic departments. As we've grown institutes and centers in the humanities, much of the flexible funding to do creative and innovative work has gone to those priorities. So this support gives us a way to invest in many of our core humanities departments to allow them to advance curiosity-driven scholarship and community engagement in impact-focused activities. 

I expect the funds will be used by each department for a range of programs to connect students and faculty to cutting edge scholarship, including student travel to national conferences, research travel to examine artifacts, artworks, and documents. Some departments might purchase materials for their research to add to university collections. Funding could also be used by departments to convene conferences that will bring multiple scholars to Brown.

What are some of the top funding priorities in the arts and humanities that would make a great impact on the student experience at Brown?

People and programs are top priorities, particularly professorships, postdocs, and graduate students. As all of higher education is facing budget challenges due to inflation and shifts in federal funding, Brown is leaning into the liberal arts at a time when other universities are pulling away. It’s truly an opportunity for Brown to invest in hiring the very best talent in important humanistic subject areas and in the arts that are not being supported anywhere else. 

And we always need to invest in our academic programs. This is especially true in the arts and humanities. We see it as funding to create the structures and opportunities for academic innovation across multiple departments and across campus. These investments pay dividends in the undergraduate student experience and in the field-leading scholarship produced by our faculty. 

Students come to College Hill from so many different backgrounds, and we need to be able to continue to train them how to think, how to write, how to read critically, and how to interact with each other. That requires a low student-to-faculty ratio for smaller class sizes, and it requires investment in interesting curricular and co-curricular experiences.