grant proposal to the University of Chicago’s Arete Initiative project
Virtue and Its Multiple Histories: Time, Disciplinary Fixations, and the Limits of the Human
Submitted for “A New Science of Virtues” Grant Competition by:
- Jeffrey J. Cohen (Professor of English and Human Sciences, Director of the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, George Washington University)
- Eileen Joy (Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies, Southern Illinois University; co-founder of the BABEL Working Group)
- Jessica Palmer (AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Office of Science Policy and Communications)
- Jonah Lehrer (Editor-at-Large for Seed Magazine and author of the books How We Decide andProust Was a Neuroscientist)
We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers who represent disparate fields (literature, history, biology, art, and cognitive science) and distant time periods (the premodern and the modern). Jeffrey J. Cohen and Eileen Joy are scholars of medieval literature and cultural studies; Jessica Palmer is a biologist and an artist; Jonah Lehrer is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on cognitive science in dialogue with the humanities. The four of us are interested in utilizing new modes of electronic communication (especially but not limited to the three blogs we manage and author: In the Middle, Bioephemera, and The Frontal Cortex) to foster new cross-disciplinary scholarly and creative communities. [Read more at In the Middle.]
