Hail and Farewell from Jan Parker, Editor-in-Chief 2001-2016; continuing Founding Chair of the international research group and network

 

Dedicated to those who made the journal happen:

Prof.s Lorna Hardwick and Elle Chambers, founders of the Higher Education Research Group in 1992: an international network of leading discipline researchers advocating for the Humanities as transformatory and the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Arts subject centres they helped to set up and advise and who became the original UK Editorial Board

Prof. Mary Huber, Carnegie Academy for the Improvement of University Teaching, Prof. Kate Stimpson, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University & former President of the Modern Languages Association (MLA) and Prof. Sean Brawley, founder Australasian Editor, now Head of Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University

And Sara Miller McCune, founder of Sage, who in 1997 approached us in HERG, proposing that we turn the Humanities & Arts International Network newsletter and website and the collected papers of the annual conference ‘Innovations in Teaching and Learning in the Humanities’ into the first Sage Humanities journal.

Ab Initio!

In the late 1990s when I was finishing my Higher Education Research Group inspired monograph on ‘teaching dialogic texts then and now’: Dialogic Education and The Problematics of Translation in Homer and Greek Tragedy, I was invited by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities to be part of the Writing in the Disciplines Cornell Consortium.

WiD’s mantra informed this journal’s mission statement: that you do not ‘do’ research and then ‘write up’ but rather that you transform as you write the discipline. What we needed to transform Humanities HE was transformative Humanities writing and this, the first international Arts and Humanities HE journal, to publish in: a journal for essays about innovations in disciplinary meaning-making and significance-highlighting processes. So,

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education seeks to:

• Publish high quality, peer-reviewed articles that bring critical research to the fore and stimulate debate.
• Serve the community of arts and humanities educators internationally, by publishing significant opinion and research into contemporary issues of teaching and learning within the domain. These will include enquiries into policy, the curriculum and appropriate forms of assessment, as well as developments in methods such as electronic modes of scholarship and course delivery.
• Publish articles characterised by profound thought about both the interface between research and teaching in the subject in question and the transformational purposes of a higher education.
• Promote re-conceptualisation of arts and humanities disciplines in ways that reflect, and reflect upon, teaching.

How have we done in fulfilling these objectives?

We have published international leaders’ exemplary essays (e.g. vol. 13.1-2, 2014 writings from and inspired by Arendt, Attridge, Barnett, Bhabha, Clarke, Deegan, Derrida, Evans, Heaney, Kanter, Mandela, Moltow, Ndebele, Nussbaum, Stimpson, Strathern, Tagore, New Voices and Editors).

And special international Issues on Teaching Literature vol. 6.2 (2007); Modern Languages vol. 10.2; Religion vol. 10.3 (2011); Digital Humanities vol. 11.1-2 (2012); Creative and Performing Arts vol. 12 2-3 (2013) and Reflective Conservatoire vol. 15 3-4 (2016).

With fora on Civic Engagement, Public Value of Arts and Humanities’ Research, Theorising Practice, Masculinities, CASTL & SoTL, Digital Storytelling and the forthcoming Special Issues on Tuning History; Dialogue in Theology & Philosophy, Narrative Medicine & Critique as a Signature Pedagogy in the Arts and Humanities, we have covered every and multiple Humanities and Arts disciplines.

And with State of Urgency: The Humanities in South Africa, vol. 15.1 (2016), A Humanities Manifesto for Europe & the forthcoming South American Intercultural University Models, we have published contributions from every area of the world.

So it is left for me to give happy thanks for the past and very best wishes for the future to the new Editor, Jan MacArthur, a great supporter of the journal since discussing the ideas which were to become her 2013 book Rethinking knowledge within higher education: Adorno and social justice.

And to give heartfelt thanks to the founding Editorial Board for 15 years of service:

Derek AttridgeYork University, UKRon BarnettInstitute for Education, UKRandall BassCenter for New Design of Learning & Scholarship, Georgetown University, USAMichael BérubéPennsylvania State University, USAAlan BoothUniversity of Nottingham, UKChrissie BougheyRhodes University, South AfricaRosi BraidottiUtrecht University, The NetherlandsJim ColemanUniversity Council of Modern Languages, Open University, UKSteven ConnorRegius Professor, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UKBrett de BaryCornell University, USAMarilyn DeeganDigital Humanities, King’s College London, UK Simon GoldhillCentre for Research in Arts, Social Science and Humanities, University of Cambridge, UKLorna HardwickThe Open University, Milton Keynes, UKPoul HolmDirector, Humanities Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, IrelandJonathan HolmesCreative and Performing Arts, University of Tasmania, AustraliaStanley N. KatzDirector, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, United StatesBen KnightsTeesside University, UK Sherry LinkonGeorgetown University, USAAlan LiuEnglish Department, University of California, Santa BarbaraJohn Bosco LourdusamyIndian Institute of Technology Madras, IndiaPeter MandlerUniversity of Cambridge, UKDavid PaceIndiana University, USAOtto PetersFernuniversitat, Hagen, GermanyStephanie PittsDepartment of Music, University of Sheffield, UKKate StimpsonNew York University, USAPatrik SvenssonDirector, HUMlab, Umeå University, SwedenDavid TritelliAssociation of American Colleges and Universities, USAJohn UnsworthDirector, Illinois Informatics Institute, University of Illinois, USAPeter ValeChair of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, South AfricaGeoff WardPrincipal, Homerton College, University of Cambridge, UK

Jan Parker, University of Cambridge, December 2016