News

NEW ORLEANS – Tulane University has launched the Tulane Global Humanities Center, a new interdisciplinary initiative examining global trade, infrastructure and cultural exchange through the lens of the humanities. The center’s work is shaped by New Orleans’ long history as a global port and its continued growth as a modern trade and logistics hub.

“A global humanities center has never been more important than now,” said Brian T. Edwards, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Herb Weil Professor of the Humanities at Tulane University, who led the creation of the new center. “The human and societal challenges we face seem especially great and it is a moment when the world is both more complex and more interconnected than ever.”

Anchored on Tulane University’s Uptown campus, the center serves as a gathering point not just for faculty, students and visiting scholars, but also for artists and members of the wider New Orleans community.

Why Port Cities Matter Now

“The humanities allow us to step back and look at questions relating to infrastructure, trade, and economic resilience by asking about the human impact on economic systems, and vice versa,” Edwards said. He pointed to comparative study of cities such as Marseille, Salvador, Tangier and Ho Chi Minh City as a way to understand how places with shared characteristics have developed effective responses to common challenges.

Building on that approach, the center uses New Orleans as a case study within a global network of port cities to examine how trade, labor and infrastructure shape economies and cultures and inform future innovation.

“Port cities around the world are highly creative places where innovation is the rule and everyday forms of creativity are the air we breathe,” Edwards said, adding that studying them comparatively highlights how exchange and openness have long played central roles in navigating economic change and uncertainty.

“Port cities are exceptional places that are multilingual, multinational, and historically layered. I believe that they offer lessons and warnings about what the future may hold,” Edwards said. Their shared challenges, he said, range from environmental pressures to adapting cities shaped by earlier eras of global trade to the realities of contemporary economic systems.

That layered history includes the region’s deeper Indigenous past. New Orleans is known in the Choctaw language as Bulbancha, meaning “the place of other tongues,” reflecting its long-standing role as a site of cultural and linguistic exchange prior to European colonization.

Humanities and the Modern Economy

Taken together, Edwards said those layered histories demonstrate why humanities-based inquiry remains relevant to contemporary economic and social change.

Tulane Global Humanities Center Programming

As part of that work, the Tulane Global Humanities Center organizes its programming around interdisciplinary biennial themes designed to foster sustained conversation and collaboration. Its inaugural theme, “Global Port Cities,” examines ports as engines of economic activity and as sites where infrastructure, culture and environmental risk intersect.

The theme debuted with a two-day symposium held Jan. 22–23 on Tulane campus. Events included discussions of global socio-cultural and economic flows featuring scholars from Tulane University, Yale University and Columbia University, along with a keynote address by Arjun Appadurai of New York University.

“When students, researchers, artists, and community members from different backgrounds come together and leave thinking differently, that’s a meaningful measure of impact. The strong turnout for our inaugural symposium—and the wide range of people it attracted—was particularly gratifying in this respect,” said Edwards.

Additional panels explored conservation and colonial heritage, diaspora and migration, ancient trade networks, and musical exchange, including a collaboration with the New Orleans Jazz Museum.