How ASU’s Humanities Institute helps shape scholars’ careers

All ideas start somewhere — a library, a thought in the shower — until they develop into a crucial piece of work that has been evaluated by peers and properly contextualized through academic study in the field. “The most important commodity for scholars is time,” Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute, says. And with time, space and funds, a scholar’s monograph can grow from the seed of an idea to scholarship bound and contained within a front and back cover. That’s what’s happening to Brian Goodman, who was awarded a Fellowship with ASU’s Humanities Institute during the 2023-24 academic year.

A specialist in human rights and dissident literatures in the Department of English and an affiliate of ASU Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center, Goodman had just published his first book, “The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain.” While he felt energized about starting his next project, he wasn’t sure where to begin.

“I had lots of ideas for my second book, probably too many, but I also had no idea what form that book should take. So, I went looking for a transdisciplinary space where I could think expansively about my next project alongside a brilliant community of humanists. And that’s exactly what I found at the Humanities Institute,” Goodman says.

The Humanities Institute supports faculty through a variety of opportunities and programming, including Fellowships, Seed Grants, and events. The Fellowship program advances the scholarly writing and research of humanities faculty through course releases, research funding, peer writing groups and development of a cross-humanities faculty community, including assistance in grant writing and writing for broad readers. Fellowships also encourage scholars to connect their ideas to shared themes and new public audiences.

“My fellowship year helped me kickstart my new book project,” says Goodman, who was working on “The Antipolitical Imagination: Literature, Dissent and Human Rights.” “I was able to share some of my earliest writing for this new project with other Fellows at the Humanities Institute and test out my ideas with different scholarly audiences. During my fellowship year, I presented initial research and received valuable feedback at conferences for scholars of comparative literature, American Jewish writing and US history.”

With encouragement from the Humanities Institute on grant and fellowship applications, Goodman applied to external opportunities with the goal of advancing his research on what he calls “the antipolitical imagination.” Just last month, he learned that he was accepted to the American Council of Learned Societies Summer Institute for the Study of East Central and Southeastern Europe and as a Budapest Open Society Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University.

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to conduct archival research in Budapest. At Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study, I will be embedded with a community of international scholars who are also thinking about what it means to work and live in “Illiberal Times and Spaces,” a subject with pressing importance in the United States today. The American Council of Learned Societies Summer Institute will similarly provide an opportunity to connect my research to the problem of “Epistemic Mistrust,” including politicized attacks on higher education,” Goodman says.

Goodman’s book will be the first project to provide a literary history of “antipolitics,” a set of ideas and practices experimented with by a wide range of dissenting artists, intellectuals and human-rights activists in the 1970s and ’80s. Given his transnational interests, Goodman shares that his research wouldn’t be possible without the opportunity to visit international archives and connect with scholars in the regions he studies, which will allow him to prepare his work for publishing.

“A change in scenery also doesn’t hurt: finding a new routine and new places to write can unlock new ideas,” he adds. “One of the biggest goals of my project is to show a general readership how the idiosyncratic ideas of a small group of dissenting writers in faraway places like Prague and Budapest helped transform the meaning of democracy and human rights at the end of the Cold War. They also produced some great art. And I think we still have a lot to learn from these writers today.”