Centre for the Humanities opens its archive of video lectures

CfH archive of video lectures
 

The Centre for the Humanities (CfH) is proud to present its archive of video lectures http://cfh-lectures.hum.uu.nl/. This is a sizable collection of videos recorded during the successful academic and public events organized by the Centre over the years. This impressive material is now gathered in one single and easily accessible platform, designed by the Digital Humanities Lab of our faculty. Built around the main research lines and leading themes of CfH’s activities, the archive  allows users not only to look back into the rich academic history of the Centre, but also to re-visit the ideas of great contemporary thinkers, including Judith Butler, Michel Serres, Paul Gilroy, Étienne Balibar, Moira Gatens, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Charles Taylor, Rosi Braidotti, and many others. In so doing, the archive aims to become a valuable learning tool for the Utrecht academic community, offering material that can be used in courses and classrooms, or as a resource for personal research and analysis.

The events featured in the archive range from international initiatives such as the Edward Said Memorial Conference in 2013, the Treaty of Utrecht Visiting Professors (2009-13); the Philosophy After Nature Conference in 2014, as well as the regular annual events like the School of Critical Theory (2011-12) and other symposia and lecture series. It also includes the most recent series of seminars: the Posthuman Glossary (co-organized with BAK in May-June this year), and Eventalks (co-organized with Utrecht Early Music Festival and Residenties in Utrecht in August 2015). The archive also contains videos from the ongoing project The Humanities in Europe Interview Series, filmed by the award-winning documentarist and CfH artist-in-residence Janina Pigaht, and an interview with Mariam Said filmed in 2013.

Accessible platform for broad audience

All videos have been made fully accessible to the public through an easily searchable interface that allows users to search the archive by speaker, event or theme/tag. Moreover each video page contains selected introductory information about the topic, the speaker and the event it was part of. The hypertextual nature of the archive facilitates users’ navigation and experience, and reflects the interdisciplinarity that is proper to CfH’s activities and to the Humanities today.  

We hope the CfH’s video archive will serve as a flexible instrument to assist users in the task of  addressing contemporary questions and thus help to connect the university further with civil society. Making this archive widely available is also a way of stating that the Humanities do not belong only within the walls of academic institutions, but rather, as Prof. Rosi Braidotti puts it, ‘the Humanities are everywhere and for everyone’.

More information
CfH lectures website