chicago humanities festival

chicago humanities festival

Exploring the Impact and Evolution of the Chicago Humanities Festival

1. Introduction to the Chicago Humanities Festival

The idea of the Festival was the response to this perceived anomaly. Modeled to an extent on a biennial event that had been established in 1980 by the Australian National University in Canberra, the aspiration of its organizers was to create an annual, multi-arts festival that would appeal to and attract a broad and diverse audience by providing an intimate and accessible opportunity to engage with some of the world’s most intriguing and renowned scholars, writers, performers, and visual artists. That original ambition has given definition to the evolving Festival. Several unique features have enabled the Festival to endure and evolve for almost a decade and have contributed to its success. The organizing principals of the event have strategically eschewed many of the accepted conventions of arts festivals and have maintained a focus on developing a unique and compelling approach that, incidentally, has yielded robust commercial and critical success.

The Chicago Humanities Festival is a unique cultural initiative that was initially created to fill a perceived void in the local arts programming landscape. Specifically, evidence was developed to suggest that while the city was experiencing significant growth in its arts and culture sector, an increasing number of visitors were focusing primarily on the high-profile and prestigious performing arts venues and events. Alternatively, data showed that excitement and enthusiasm were not as prevalent for the city’s wide-ranging community of not-for-profit arts presenters.

2. Historical Context and Evolution of the Festival

The Edinburgh Festival was not the first international gathering to take the name of a “university” and shift the site of learning to the concert hall or theater stage. From conferences that celebrated the integration of disciplines, to an Academy at Gothenburg that formalized the idea of the Gothenburg university as a nontraditional, Noh-based academy, many events, including the public celebration of Western long hair, have borrowed the borrowed. Over time, most persevered by focusing on a specific specialty, such as the Texas International Music Festival, which has brought classical music students and alumni to Houston for nearly forty years.

The idea for hosting a humanities festival in Chicago originated with two University of Chicago academics. In 1989, political scientist Robert Pape joined forces with philosopher Wendy Doniger to develop a unique vision of what they termed a “thought fest” that would bring visitors to the University District in a way that campus athletic and fine arts events did not. The model they adopted was based largely on the international Edinburgh Festival, which was created in 1947 to celebrate and enrich European culture, defined broadly. The stated purpose of the founders of the first modern festivals was to provide a platform for the flowering arts after the devastation of World War II and to insert the notion of the human spirit as a force in the healing and rebuilding of Europe. The founders envisioned the festival as a yearly academy for elite musicians, but the focus shifted within days as other artists and genres were added to the agenda in response to public demand. The original focus on art and renewal remains today a century later.

3. Key Themes and Disciplines Explored

The author iteratively analyzed “tags” that have been used to describe CHF events since 2008. She selected recurrent and notable tags and created an alphabetical list of 180, which includes all of the tags used by presenters to describe their events, also known as “series, contexts, themes, or disciplines.” The author then categorized these terms into subject areas recognizable by humanists and social scientists, modified these categories further, and finally identified and tallied an unchanging and expanding list of key CHF themes and disciplines to analyze.

In recent years, CHF has increased the frequency of its events and the variety of presenters and partners it involves, e.g., the Obama Foundation, Chicago Architectural Association, and local education and cultural organizations. In the author’s analysis of CHF programs, she identified several recurrent themes and disciplines. Many events invite artistic and humanistic thinkers from various disciplines to shed light on a single subject, such as death. Science is a frequently explored theme and there are regular annual events, such as the Darwin Birthday Lecture, that focus on scientific ideas. While a sizable proportion of CHF programs have always addressed the topic of “Living with Information,” this proportion has increased over time, representing another area of growth. CHF’s list of past presenters reveals a range of famous and obscure individuals from multiple countries, generations, and sectors, encouraging cross-cultural, generational, and other forms of dialogue.

4. Community Engagement and Impact

Several methods to understand CHF’s historical and potential future role and value were employed. CHF had various sources of data used to build a historical report, or archival reconstruction of all past events in order to present an overview of basic facts and statistics. Then, a comprehensive review of searchable digital press records from 2005 to 2016 was conducted, identifying mentions, print space, and placements of articles for the festival. A thematic content abstraction of the mentions identified the issues in the humanities and arts that enjoy the most visibility.

Primary analytic goals were to understand the ways in which CHF extends and enhances its historical role as a major provider of humanities programming for Chicagoland residents, and the ways in which it supports and further seeks to enhance its reputation and recognition as a hub or leader for humanistic activity within the city and region. Since the festival’s inception nearly twenty-five years ago, our mission has always been to bring fascinating speakers to Chicago, presenting innovative programs as a way to discover human expressions and different cultural models.

5. Future Directions and Innovations

Indeed, the idea is so simple and elegant that there is not a lot of room for innovation. Perhaps it will be expanded to make use of new multimedia technologies, so that museums, research universities, cosponsors, and others can interact through video conferencing and telepresence with the best-performing organizations in the world on any topic at all. The selection of topics continues to play an essential role. An event can feature anything at all, but I would argue for a continuing relevance, and the original spirit of high culture with values that are the height of what the best and the brightest had accomplished in that area at that time.

What more can and should the Chicago Humanities Festival become? It is hard to question the success of CHF, which has played a significant role in advancing the public humanities in Chicago and has been copied throughout the United States. In some ways, it has put its own creation out of business. Virtually every other of the hundreds of humanities festivals in the United States has a narrower focus and shorter duration. The idea has taken root everywhere and has been adapted to universities and towns of all sizes to bring residents together to exchange ideas and questions spawned by a common presentation of the best knowledge in the humanities.