Academy Releases Special Edition of Dædalus On the Humanities

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The American Academy of Arts and Sciences will release a special issue of Dædalus dedicated to the Humanities. The Spring 2006 edition of the quarterly journal will appear in mid-April.

The new issue maps the development and evolution of seven humanities disciplines in the 21st century. The seven disciplines traced in this issue are: American Literature, Comparative Literature, History, Art History, African American Studies, Law and the Humanities, and Philosophy.

"Seismic shifts have altered individual disciplines in the humanities in the course of the twentieth century," writes Patricia Meyer Spacks, Academy president and consulting editor for the issue. Those transformations "can change our cultural heritage and thus our grasp of what it means to live in the world."

The Dædalus issue includes essays by Spacks, Steven Marcus, Anthony Grafton, Andrew Delbanco, Pauline Yu, Thomas Crow, Gerald Early, Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson, and Dagfinn Føllesdal and Michael Friedman.

The Academy's Humanities Initiative focuses on the new and increasingly complex challenges that are reshaping conditions for the humanities in the United States. One component of that initiative is the creation of the Humanities Indicators, a prototype set of data that will provide a comprehensive picture of the state of the humanities in the United States. The Academy recently received a three-year $701,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the Humanities Indicators Project. In addition to compiling data about the humanities, the Academy will continue to provide qualitative analysis of the state of the humanities and the trends that affect them.

Dædalus was founded in 1955 as the Journal of the Academy and was established as a quarterly in 1958. It draws on the enormous intellectual capacity of the American Academy, whose Fellows are among the nation's most prominent thinkers in the arts, sciences, and the humanities, as well as the full range of professions and public life. Features in the magazine include fiction, poetry, and a Notes section with original works by distinguished members of the American Academy. Dædalus is published by the MIT Press.