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David Ferris, chair of the University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Department of Humanities and professor of comparative literature and humanities, has been awarded a fellowship at Cambridge University’s Centre for Research into the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, which is described as the United Kingdom’s premier center for interdisciplinary inquiry.

While residing in Cambridge for the Easter term 2010, Ferris will conduct research into the future of the university in the 21st century. His project will be titled: “Disciplining a Future/Transforming a Past.”

The CRASSH fellowship fosters interdisciplinary collaborations to stimulate fresh thinking and dialogue in and beyond the humanities and social sciences and to reach out to new collaborators and new publics.

CRASSH’s visiting fellowships can be awarded for periods of up to 12 weeks in any one Cambridge term, during which fellows are expected live in Cambridge. While there, Ferris will address the sustainable, renewable or “future” university.

Ferris says the history of his field, comparative literature, has been defined by the challenges facing the traditional disciplines of the humanities as they absorb the methods of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study.

“Building on the analysis undertaken in an essay about the current state of comparative literature, ‘Indiscipline,’ my project focuses on whether interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methods of inquiry can constitute fields of study in their own right or whether their significance is restricted to producing transformations within already existing disciplines for the future university,” Ferris says.

Ferris will probe the question of whether the university is entering a new era of discipline-formation or if the “proliferation of inter- and transdisciplinary centers signal the university’s hesitation about its own future as it simultaneously preserves its historical disciplines and creates transitional models alongside them.”

In a statement about the fellowship program, CRASSH makes a similar point, saying the modern university must find “new forms and organizations of knowledge, and new modes of transmission. Twenty-first-century technologies have speeded up knowledge exchange and academic globalization, yet disjunctions remain.”

The modern university must keep pace with a complex and rapidly changing world, but to retain its capacity for innovation, it also must preserve a space for critical reflection and creativity, Cambridge states, adding that CRASSH provides a microcosm of such a space.

Ferris says it will be a treat to renew friendships and explore common research interests with colleagues in Cambridge. “And last, but not least, it has been a long, long time since I have experienced the lush greenness of spring in the UK.”