ABOUT
The Tulane Global Humanities Center (TGHC) will be a gathering place for Tulane scholars and students, as well as visitors and guests from the New Orleans community and beyond. It will center the humanities and amplify scholarship and teaching that takes a global perspective broadly understood, recognizing that Tulane’s location in New Orleans/Bulbancha is at once a global port city and a key nexus in the Gulf South. Building off both of these aspects and exploring their intersections inspires the Center’s activities and trajectory. By organizing interdisciplinary biennial themes, the TGHC will generate conversations, scholarship, and teaching that underlines the importance of the humanities in addressing some of the most challenging problems of our times and opening them up to new perspectives and insights.
Anchored in Uptown New Orleans, the Tulane Global Humanities Center is at a unique geographical crossroads. New Orleans is a global port city in the Gulf South, a complex hub where the colonial project of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade had profound impact on the economy, population, and built environment, and a place where climate change and rising sea levels are a part of lived experience. The Choctaw name for this land is Bulbancha, or place of other tongues; the area’s linguistic and cultural complexity preceded the arrival of Europeans in the late 17th century. Established by the French in 1718, ceded to Spain in 1723, and acquired by the United States in 1803, New Orleans is home to many diverse populations who either have descended from this complex history or established themselves in the intervening centuries.
Ports are spaces of contact and access, transnational and transitional places where the global informs the local and vice versa. The Tulane Global Humanities Center aspires to inspire research, host conversation, and convene dialogues worthy of its host city.
The wicked problems of the present and the great challenges of the future require bold thinking that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Tulane’s location in a global port city makes it ideal for nourishing innovative thought leaders and harnessing the creative power of the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts for positive social change.
Biennial Theme
Global Port Cities
The Global Port Cities project explores the relationship between port cities and creativity and the potential for their creative economy for positive change.