I have the privilege of teaching at a university with a rich tradition of humanities research and teaching. Nonetheless, even at Leiden University, teaching the history of the humanities (HoH) is not self-evident. I’ll mention three challenges, the first of which is the most basic one: How to get a HoH seminar on the course list?
Within my department, the number of students interested in HoH is typically not large enough to fill up a classroom. Therefore, in the past few years, I have been offering a HoH course in the interdisciplinary honors program, for students from across the humanities. A unique selling point of the course is that I use my own university as a case study. I do so, not of out misplaced chauvinism, but
- because many students want to know more about the place where they are studying;
- because so many influential scholars have worked in Leiden, or with Leiden collections; and
- because it allows me to organize excursions to local museums, libraries, and archival collections – excursions that students like very much.
But what then – challenge number two – about students who have little affinity with dead white males? From a diversity point of view, HoH is a difficult topic to teach. What I have learned over the years is that it is best to address this head-on. Another thing I have learned is that it helps to approach such issues from a variety of perspectives, not only historically, as I am inclined to do, but also from a moral point of view. What should we think of misogynistic or colonial-minded humanists, and to what extent are we their heirs, voluntarily or not? Finally, students are often most interested in the recent past. They want to discuss Edward Said, when the assigned reading is a seventeenth-century text by Thomas Erpenius, Leiden’s first professor of Arabic. This has led me, after a while, to reverse the chronological order, starting not with Lipsius and Scaliger but in the present, with students’ own questions about the humanities here and now, and then gradually working our way back in time. From a didactic point of view, such a genealogical approach, as you might call it, works much better.
Further reading: Herman Paul, “Genealogies of the Humanities: A Vision for the Field,” History of Humanities 8, no. 2 (2023): 199–207.