April 2008
Provost’s Common Fund winner will give Duke community an opportunity to experience interdisciplinary studies in action.
Rarely does an opportunity arise to actively and simultaneously engage departments in the university as diverse as economics, literature, art, psychology, gender studies, theatre and dance, history, and more. Such an opportunity will come to Duke in fall 2008 with the program “Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury”.
Several interdisciplinary colloquia, panel discussions, art exhibits, theatrical performances, and a film series are being planned around the theme of the Bloomsbury Group. The Bloomsbury Group was an informal association of friends in Britain in the first half of the 20th century that included pioneers and leaders in a remarkable number of fields, among them: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, G.E. Moore, Roger Fry, and others.
Courses, both undergraduate and graduate, will also be offered. Julian Bell, a prominent painter and writer, and grandson of Bloomsbury members Vanessa and Clive Bell, is slated to speak at one of the events. The programming for “Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury” is being organized in conjunction with a forthcoming exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke entitled A Room of Their Own: The Artists of Bloomsbury. The exhibition is being organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in cooperation with the Nasher Museum, and will run from December 2008 through April 2009.
“The Bloomsbury Group successfully achieved interdisciplinarity. They continually challenged conventional wisdom through active and ongoing conversation -- in their art, their writings, their activism as well as in one-on-one conversations in each others’ living rooms. We hope to attract a broad audience to this programming that will take part in many of these events, and will see the recurring themes from different perspectives,” remarked Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics and one of the lead organizers of the Bloomsbury project.
The Bloomsbury project is sponsored in part through the Provost’s Common Fund, an annual competition that awards up to $50,000 each to proposals for innovative scholarly research and artistic activity that clearly crosses the boundaries of departments, schools, and/or interdisciplinary units at Duke.
“This is exactly the kind of project the Provost’s Common Fund was created to support,” noted Susan Roth, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. “The events being planned around the Bloomsbury theme exemplify Duke’s interest in encouraging and promoting interdisciplinary studies.”
More information on the Provost’s Common Fund is available at http://www.interdisciplinary.duke.edu/funding/common.php.