Research in the Public Interest
The humanities often don’t seem very practical. They are what you do when you read a book at night or study your family history. They explore questions that aren't critical to whether you will fall down or up should you slip, or to the bottom line on your bank statement.
That has less to do with what the humanities are than with where they are applied. At Research and Education, we see the humanities as a set of tools and techniques that can be used to help us understand anything – including the most intractable problems we face today: war, crime, loneliness, illness, even the failure of business ethics and political chicanery. In fact, at VFH we believe that these problems remain intractable precisely because we don’t apply the humanities to them. The humanities look at the history of a problem, its origins in past errors or assumptions. They take apart the language used in a field and look for built-in contradictions and confusions. They look to the ethical systems developed by philosophers like Bentham and Kant, and help us to understand where our expectations may be illogical or in conflict. They give us ideas about how to act in a circumstance by showing how people acted in similar circumstances before and what consequences they encountered. The humanities remind us that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to human nature, and that people in different times indeed found solutions to some issues that face us today. The humanities, by taking the fire out of discussions and rooting them in rational language and respect for ideas, often cool off angry debates enough to allow both sides to hear one another, and just maybe to come to some solution. From the humanities we learn the important lesson that the essence of peaceful community is compromise, and that in compromises, no one is completely happy – or completely right.
At Research and Education, we support scholarship addressing issues of public interest, from the history of Civil Rights in the South to the arguments for African American reparations, and from the archeology of Jamestown to the varied roles of teachers. Through an international competition held in December each year, the VFH Board and a review panel select up to 10 Fellows in Residence for the coming academic year. Fellows may also be invited by VFH to support work on particular VFH programs. For more information, see Fellowships.
We also sponsor summer teachers’ institutes, including an annual institute on Roots: Teaching the African Dimensions of the History and Culture of the Americas (Through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).
The Center on Violence and Community is also a program of Research and Education.
