In part one of his four-part series, Religious Studies professor Gil Anidjar offers an incisive autocritique of the university.

I am standing in Stanford University's Green Library with a large box of books at my feet. These are community cookbooks, rare in the sense that all are from small, local organizations and are part of short print runs. I have been here for about an hour in front of the Book Eye, a high-quality book scanner that nonetheless requires me to manually flip a page and push a button every few seconds to get my scan. The process is tedious, my feet are going numb, and I have only scanned two books. The numbers game is not looking good for me.

Presumably, it has never been a good time for the humanities. Perhaps because it is simply in the nature of these disciplines to find themselves perpetually in crisis, lagging behind the times, dragging their leaden feet made out of indelible words, asking for more and more time in a civilization perpetually in a rush. They are constantly on the edge of a precipice, but we cannot deny that, while they awkwardly balance on the edge, they do enjoy magnificent views. After all, our fields do not thrive on security, on solid facts, on controlled experiments with measurable outcomes.

Is methodological rigor all that is necessary to establish a humanities curriculum, or do humanists have a duty to center moral principles in our pedagogy? How might we bridge the two extremes of delineating humanities departments in American universities—rigidly bordered individual fields versus large umbrella programs like the Global Humanities? What could exist between the scales of the local and the global?

As a reflection on representations on biodiversity in art, this contribution considers the breadth of marine species highlighted in one work by British Surrealist, Eileen Agar (1899-1991). Much of her work relates to the natural world, especially the sea as an ecosystem and all the life within it, referred to here as the marine.