The crisis of Humanities

In a historical moment in which the humanities seem to be in crisis everywhere, we decided to take a little space for a regenerating reflection by gathering us around a challenge: imagining experiments and new models to connect knowledge. Once confined to the boundaries of the single disciplines, nowadays knowledge openly circulates in a network space of relationships where media, memory and cognitive horizons, although very different, can’t help to contaminate themselves. In this new context, what can be the role of university? What are the new tools, methods and skills we need? Is it possible to imagine a truly interdisciplinary and integrated education and research? We believe that such questions can only be answered by bringing together different expertise, experiences and intellectual sensibilities, exploring – from diverse points of view- the practices and the dynamics of culture as well as the cultural processes in which the data are processed, reproduced and transmitted. New Humanities tries to do this proposing seven projects on interdisciplinary themes that require the interaction between scholars from different fields and horizons, united in the awareness that the time of the “two cultures” now belongs to the prehistory of sciences.