It is an extraordinary honor to serve as the Neubauer Collegium’s interim director for the 2025–26 academic year. When I was asked to fill in for Tara Zahra, the Collegium’s brilliant Roman Family Director, during her research leave, I was aware of the basic contours of the role. I had evaluated research proposals as a member of the inaugural faculty advisory board, and I later collaborated on a number of Collegium projects myself. When I served in the Provost’s office as Senior Advisor for the Arts, I saw that the Collegium supports a thriving culture of creative expression on campus – most obviously through its exhibitions gallery, but more subtly (and, I think, more substantially) by incorporating the visual and performing arts into the full gamut of its interdisciplinary projects. It was clear to me that Collegium projects were pioneering new forms of inquiry in an environment characterized by a commitment to unfettered exploration. The work was important and groundbreaking, and I was excited to support it.

What I did not see until I took up the position as interim director is that imagination is a key quality – arguably, the key quality – of the Collegium’s work. At a moment when humanistic scholars are buffeted by budget constraints and consolidation, when the broader cultural and political climate is overwhelmingly shaped by uncertainty and threat, the thrill of imaginative work does not seem to be in abundant supply. And yet research activities at the Collegium are animated by varied pleasures: the enthusiastic embrace of new perspectives and partnerships, exhilarating forays into unexplored areas of inquiry, hidden horizons and unforeseen intersections coming into view. As the following pages demonstrate, the wide variety of projects we support share a fervent – even a ferocious – commitment to imaginative exploration of the world’s complexity. That commitment drives our research forward.

This Notions report is a snapshot of Collegium research in action. A look back at highlights from the previous calendar year, a notable one during which we marked our ten-year milestone with a high-profile set of public convenings, also provides a look forward at the next ten years. In January we were honored to receive a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation to launch the Future of the Humanities project, a two-year initiative that will assess and articulate the value of the humanities in higher education and society. The work will be informed in part by the experiments in thinking that Collegium research teams have tested and refined, the results of which are on vibrant display in the pages that follow.

The work will also be marked by the indelible contributions of our longstanding director Jonathan Lear, who died unexpectedly at the outset of this academic year. We miss Jonathan every day and sense his commitments – his singular wit, generosity, and intelligence – in everything we do. In the characteristically brilliant essay “The Call of Another’s Words,” Jonathan reflected upon the redemptive urgency of realizing the imagination’s potential. His thoughts, written in 2011, resonate just as powerfully today: “If one can succeed in making an imaginative possibility robust, it can have a profound effect on how we live our lives. For our lives are shaped not just by what we take to be the case, but also by our sense of what is possible. Once an imaginative possibility is opened up, there is room for it to become a practical necessity.”

At the Neubauer Collegium we strive to create the conditions that enable our colleagues to open up imaginative possibilities, and to realize the opportunities – and the practical necessities – that follow from that imaginative work.

David Levin
Interim Faculty Director
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

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