Learn more about the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) here: [ Ссылка ]

Over the last couple of years, our institutes and universities have pivoted all over the world to online technologies for our events, collaborations, meetings and communications. The newly dominant technologies have done much to change our current understanding of a face, just as the invention and use of photography, of the close up in cinema, of the smartphone and facial recognition, of the television newscaster, and of the shifting nature of portraiture, icons and masks have done so in the past. These various technologies of the face, that are indicative of the idea of the front and the back, of an idea of the eyes as the mark of the front, have often been seen as indexed to the human, to identity, or to anthropomorphism. Fields in the humanities have addressed this by considering the emergence of face as prosopopoeia, as the instantiation of aesthetic symmetry par excellence, and as figuration.

This conference, which took place between May 19-22, 2022, asked: what is a face? And what is the form of a face? How does the face index the human? Do non-human animals have faces? What scale of relationality is implied in the phrase, face to face?

The final keynote was delivered by outgoing CHCI president, Dr. Sara Guyer. Dr. Guyer has devoted her entire career to teaching, advancing, and serving the humanities. Until August 2021, she was Dorothy Puestow Draheim Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directed the Center for the Humanities for over a decade. She is the author of Romanticism after Auschwitz (2007) and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (2015) and the editor of the book series Lit Z.

The CHCI is a global forum that strengthens the work of humanities centers and institutes through advocacy, grant-making, and inclusive collaboration. The CHCI advances cross-institutional partnerships, recognizes regional humanities cultures, and mobilizes the collective capacity of the humanities to engage the most pressing issues in society today. The FHI was institutional host of the CHCI from 2007 to 2016.

Image credit: ian dooley on Unsplash.com

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