About the Minerva Humanities Center
The Minerva Humanities Center promotes innovative interdisciplinary research in the humanities. The Center holds forums for reflection and intellectual debate that bring together researchers from a variety of national, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds. It strives to establish a learning community of research students, postdoctoral and senior researchers; initiates collaborations with leading academic institutions and researchers worldwide; and works to bring research produced in Israel to a wide international audience.
The Center supports research projects dealing with historical or current reciprocal ties between knowledge, culture, and politics, and with the development of innovative teaching and writing methods that translate the theoretical interest in such issues into tangible academic work. The Center’s researchers are attuned to the challenges peculiar to the present moment in time and to the current conditions for the production and organization of knowledge in the humanities. The Center strives to broaden the target audience of the humanities and amplify their public influence while at the same time carrying on the tradition of critical thought that has always been associated with them.
The Minerva Humanities Center began its operations in 2009 thanks to a grant from the German Minerva Foundation. The center is also generously supported by the Cohn family. With the inauguration of the Center were launched its first three research projects. The Migrating Knowledge project, headed by Professor Rivka Feldhay, reexamines the intellectual heritage of the early modern era in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia as a product of the migration of scholars, ideas, manuscripts, instruments, and linguistic expertise. The project Lexicon for Political Theory: Encyclopedia in the Making, led by Professor Adi Ophir, is initiating the writing and compilation of lexical essays on concepts – traditional, borrowed, and invented – that relate to the political; and the project Living Together: Exploring Modes of Political Membership, headed by Dr. Raef Zreik, is designed to enrich the existing repertory of forms of association, belonging, and political citizenship. The project is grounded in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sources of all eras (premodern, modern, contemporary) in an attempt to expand the perspectives that emerge from the clash between liberalism and its recent critics.
Click to read the Minerva Humanities Center Annual Reports
MHC’s International Scientific Board:
- Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, Germany (Chair).
- Prof. Dr. Gerd Graßhoff, Professor for History of Ancient Science, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
- Prof. Dr. Kostas Gavroglu, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Athens University, Athens, Greece.
- Prof. Dr. Yaron Ezrachi (Emeritus), Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
- Prof. Dr. Ora Limor, Open University, Raanana, Israel.
- Prof. Dr. Leo Corry, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.