Associate Professor of English Rob Mitchell, who heads the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, and the Center Advisory Board, have received support from Humanities Writ Large to engage in significant outreach to undergraduate students through course identification and promotion as well as speaker residencies aimed at undergraduate audiences.

The theme for this year's activities through the Center is neuroeconomics.  While this name seems to imply bringing together two disciplines -- neuroscience and economics -- that are each quite distant from the humanities proper, the Center Advisory Board sees neuroeconomics as one of the most recent examples of a desire among some researchers in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explain many, if not all, of those activities we associate with the humanities -- valuation, judgment, aesthetic appreciation and response, etc. -- as simply consequences or functions of neuronal activities.  What is at stake in the topic of neuroeconomics, then, are models of the "brain" and "economics" that have direct implications for how we understand those areas of human experience that have traditionally been the focus of the humanities. 

They have planned a one-day symposium on "Neuroeconomics" on April 12th, 2013, from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm in the FHI Garage (Smith Warehouse). The goal of the symposium is to contextualize—both historically and in terms of science studies methodologies—the models of the “brain” and of “economics” that underwrite the recent emergence of “Neuroeconomics.”