International Network for Comparative Humanities

Who We Are

A working group of literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic dedicated to promoting the comparative study of humanities.

A research network that puts teaching at the center, not at the periphery of its institutional activities.

What We Intend

To develop a new model for “networking” in the humanities, one that stresses the importance of collaboration across generational as well as national and institutional boundaries.

General Program

A series of workshops that brings faculty and students together across the network for sustained discussions inside and outside the seminar room and lecture hall.

Network Focus

The character, role and value of emotions—in literature and other forms of artistic expression, as a factor in political life, as a horizon of groundbreaking research in the neurosciences—is currently an exciting, if vexed and often controversial subject of study in both the sciences and humanities. INCH will respond to this affective turn, a development most strikingly represented by new inquiries into the somatic as well as ethical nature of literary and artistic phenomena. In revisiting questions that date back to Aristotle and that were the focus of the aesthetic and cultural debates of the eighteenth century, these inquiries are shattering the structuralist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and postmodern accounts of language, of the subject, of human feelings and capacities.

Anchor Institutions

Member Institutions