Research lies at the heart of the modern world. An estimated trillion dollars are spent yearly on research across a spectrum from government to private corporations, and from the military to medicine. In the humanities, it is a central credo. As a subject of research, it raises vital issues: about public and private goods, about the implications of basic as opposed to applied research, about the relationship between academia, art, government, and business, about the allocation of resources, about the possibility of attaining the truth about something, and about what we see and what we take for granted. It leads us into questions of individual motivation and towards the histories of institutions. “Search” and “re-search” enter our lives at nearly every turn. Join us for a historically-grounded conversation about a term and practice so fundamental to our work, yet rarely the subject of it.

Together we will interrogate “research” as a window through which to study the changing shape of knowledge, and the possibility of bringing the humanities and natural sciences into the same frame. At a time when perceived divisions between these two types of  knowledge seem large, and are growing, we invite you into a conversation not only about building an argument that could bridge differences between the “two cultures,” but questioning if they might not perhaps be only one culture: a culture of research.