Applications are now open for the 2025-26 Fellowship.
Learn how to apply here.
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Seminar sponsored by the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at The University of Tulsa is intended to promote engaged, intellectual discussion on topics of current public and intellectual interest.
Every year, a group of approximately eight Research Fellows will be chosen to collaborate on a series of weekly seminar discussions. It is hoped that these discussions will then lead into further projects, undertaken collectively or individually. These might include magazine articles, creative works, digital projects, educational initiatives, or efforts designed to spur civic action and participation. TU students, faculty members, and members of the wider Tulsa community are all eligible to apply. The admissions committee will judge applications based on assessment of the proposal’s connection to the topic and potential for sparking dialogue among the seminar’s members.
Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Seminar on MYTH
Thomas Aquinas wrote that philosophers must be lovers of myths—those strange, often awe-inspiring tales that seem to offer us access to a larger, more mysterious world. Yet we define reason precisely as the destruction of myth—the revelation of a perfectly ordered and knowable world free of both wonder and ideology. And so, we live our lives in this contradiction: surrounded by the stories we tell ourselves about the world that we simultaneously seek to dismiss or destroy. One way to understand the long-standing suspicion of the arts and humanities in the age of reason, in fact, is precisely a stubborn hostility to those mysterious forces that resist reason. They offer, after all, alternative ways to create community, speculate about other ways of being, and make meaning of our chaotic lives.
This year, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities will explore the topic of myth in all its complexity, ranging from the variety of religious belief to the modern insistence that reason is the enemy of imagination. We encourage applications from all those working in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who are eager to explore the topic. What does it mean, for example, to dismiss foundational ideas like progress or the belief in American exceptionalism as myths? Is myth a fundamentally human invention? And what special ways does it provide for mapping the larger world and our place in it? Should we understand myths as the enemy of reason, or as an alternative way of knowing and understanding? What’s the relationship between myth and politics—and what do we both gain and lose by trying to shatter or dismiss myths as mere superstition? What myths have endured? Which of them have withered? And what, if anything, do they share across time, cultures, and languages?
The Center’s work will be broadly interdisciplinary and draw on the distinctive tools of the arts and humanities while also weaving them together with science, law, business, medicine, and engineering. Fellows will pursue their own research, while also helping design a robust array of public programs at 101 Archer, including exhibitions, lectures, performances, and more. Public fellows will pursue this work alongside specially selected students and faculty from the University of Tulsa who will bring their own expertise and perspectives to bear.