The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) received a $275,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the exhibition and programming for \u201cSeeing Truth: Art, Science, and Making Knowledge (1750-2023),\u201d which will be presented at the William Benton Museum of Art during the 2023 academic year.<\/p>\n
UConn President Thomas C. Katsouleas announced the Luce grant during a reception introducing the UCHI Fellows for the 2019-2020 academic year, a group of 13 UConn faculty, visiting residential and dissertation scholars conducting research in a wide range of disciplines ranging from history and literature to culture and political science.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the most exciting things about the humanities is that it really connects the work we\u2019re all doing,\u201d Katsouleas said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s fine arts, engineering, agriculture or nursing, every corner of the university benefits from the insight and knowledge imparted by humanities research.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSeeing Truth\u201d will bring together scientific instruments, photographs, educational props, textbooks, paintings, taxidermy, expedition materials, and maps. The exhibition will challenge notions of what counts as a \u201cscientific\u201d object or as \u201cart,\u201d which will in turn challenge the assumption that there is only one way of understanding and valuing truth and knowledge.<\/p>\n
Programming for the exhibition will be in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and feature objects from its collection. \u201cSeeing Truth\u201d will later travel to other university museums in the United States.<\/p>\n
Alexis Boylan, associate professor of art and art history and Africana Studies, who is director of academic affairs for UCHI, says the goal of Humanities Institute was to develop a program that will \u201ccapture the fundamental intellectual and moral questions of our moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to have that dialogue in museums, pulling in the public to art, science, and museum spaces in new and challenging ways,\u201d Boylan says. \u201cWe need big thinking, and new kinds of thinking, for big problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSeeing Truth\u201d is itself a crucial element of a larger initiative being launched by UCHI: \u201cThe Future of Truth.\u201d This larger interdisciplinary project asks whether we can rehabilitate the notion of truth in the wider culture. In other words, does truth have a future? And how might both art and science contribute to new understandings of truth and knowledge?<\/p>\n
\u201cSeeing Truth\u201d advances the Luce Foundation\u2019s mission to inform public discourse by promoting innovative scholarship. This project aims to create an interdisciplinary conversation to consider some of the most fundamental issues of our contemporary moment\u2014an aspiration that the Luce Foundation shares.<\/p>\n
UCHI, led by Michael Patrick Lynch, professor of philosophy, has a history of sponsoring both publicly engaged and interdisciplinary research, and has administered more than $7 million in grant funding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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