The League of European Research Universities (LERU) has just published a position paper on the question what universities are for. The LERU is a group of twenty European research universities (see the list; membership is by invitation only) that together seek to influence policy in Europe.
Their paper takes a strong stand against the new discourse [...]

In an earlier post, I noted that Catherine Belsey’s keynote speech at the International Society for Cultural History conference in Ghent this August advocated a renewed attention to literary form and the utopian aspects of fictional worlds. This autumn’s issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly (59:3, Fall 2008) contains an article that thinks along similar lines.
Hugh Grady’s [...]

The Times Higher Education reports on the British Academy’s worries that policy makers underestimate the value of the humanities and social sciences. In a recent report, “Punching Our Weight: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Public Policy Making,” a working group chaired by Sir Alan Wilson reported that policy makers do not make optimal use [...]

An anonymous commenter just left a link to the new online edition of A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Three cheers to Blackwell for making this expensive resource freely available online.
The format of the site is the same as that of the Companion to the Digital Humanities: a menu of chapters on the left and [...]