“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
–Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

The Curiosity Initiative asks: What are the conditions that shape our desires to know, learn, and explore today? How are those desires experienced alongside other people, in particular places, and at specific times? What are the relationships between learning, inquiry, and action? Launched by the Center for Engaged Pedagogy and the Office of the Provost with generous support from a gift by Jane Jelenko (BC ‘70), the initiative includes a range of programs and opportunities. We’ll be exploring curiosity (and its complexity) from several disciplinary perspectives and across many different practices.

Over the next two academic years, we’ll be asking what curiosity looks like in and across different academic fields; how professors drive curiosity in the classroom, lab and studio; and how people redefine their curiosity when they care for or experience conflict with others. We aim to draw on and share the rich ways that the Barnard community is already thinking about curiosity as:

• a pedagogical opportunity
• a driver of scientific inquiry
• a subject of children’s literature
• an object of research
• an openness to the friction and disorientation of new knowledge
• an exploited resource within the attention economy, and
• a social phenomenon, among others.

Our aim with The Curiosity Initiative is twofold. First, it is to create forums to share the individual and field-specific curiosities that each of us carry. And second, it is to bring those insights into conversation as we learn from one another’s pathways and approaches.

Initiative Overview

A snapshot of ways to join and shape The Curiosity Initiative.

• Ongoing speaker series (starting Fall 2025): Learn from scholars who study curiosity today across disciplines, methods, and teaching.
• What If? Talks (starting Spring 2026): Barnard faculty share their curiosity journeys with the community.
• Faculty communities of practice (Spring & Fall 2026): Explore and learn from the many different ways that Barnard’s faculty study curiosity, how they conceptualize it, and how they facilitate its practice in the classroom.
• Student communities of practice (Spring & Fall 2026): Practice habits of curiosity in academic work and in relationships inside and outside the classroom.
• Barnard Bold Conference (Spring 2027): Poster session to showcase students’ work.

Other offerings to be defined with you! Join a community of practice or apply to be an intellectual leader to help us shape this initiative.

What is curiosity?

“Curiosity is a many-splendored thing.”
–Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar, Curiosity Studies (2021)

Curiosity has a familiar ordinary use (think, for instance, of how many times this week you’ve started a sentence with, “I’m curious to know…”). But curiosity studies, as a new transdisciplinary field of inquiry, also encourages us to understand curiosity itself as a complex and contested subject. What individuals wish or are compelled to know, how they express and follow their desires to learn, and with whom they explore the world, are all questions whose answers are shaped by distinct historical and geographical contexts, institutional and ideological contests, and methodological and conceptual priorities.

The etymologies of the words “curiosity” and “curious” encourage us to reflect on how people have attached competing values to habits of learning: borrowed from Old French, both “curiosity” and “curious” have oscillated between indicating a positive quality (careful, scrupulous attention to detail) and a negative quality (an illicit desire to know what one has no right to know). Rather than settle these conflicting definitions, we aim to make the rich ambivalence that they point to a focus of discussion and collaboration. To make curiosity into a subject itself is to consider the complex social, historical, political, and epistemological currents through which learning moves.

Why curiosity?

Though there are many emotions and impulses that are important to learning (wonder, interest, motivation, and fascination, to name a few), curiosity is unique in the way it points to a particularly active relationship to knowledge, the ways one gathers meaning from the world, and how one relates to others in the process. Indeed, scholars have been divided over how to interpret curiosity’s relationship to knowledge and society.

On one hand, there are those who extol its virtues: curiosity drives scientific discovery, sparks artists to experiment with forms and reframe the overlooked, and energizes thinking. The psychologist William James calls it an “impulse toward better cognition” that education can channel and direct. On the other hand, there are those who regard curiosity as synonymous with distraction. Philosophers like Augustine and Martin Heidegger have argued that it represents a disorganized impulse to learn that is prone to flights of fancy, shallow reflection, and self absorption. In other words, some thinkers see curiosity as a superpower for discovery, while others see it as a diversion. We want to wrestle with both views.

Whether viewed positively or negatively, curiosity is distinctive in that it makes us reckon with the social life of knowledge and how our questions can surprise, excite, or even disorient us in the world and in our relations to others.

How will we pursue curiosity?

To take curiosity seriously, as we see it, is to push against reductive constructions of disagreement and debate and to instead reflect on and invest in inquiry as an unfolding social process. To that end, the communities of practice and the programming that make up this initiative are places where we want to hear about all the ways you think about and pursue curiosity. You might find your way into this conversation in a variety of ways. We want to hear and learn from those who:

• Aim to cultivate curiosity in themselves or their students, and have ideas and questions to bring into conversation with others;
• Investigate the neurological and physiological processes involved in the practice of curiosity;
• Have insights into the historically and geographically specific behaviors, habits, and practices that have given curiosity distinctive expressions and enrolled curiosity in different social and institutional projects; and
• Study the dynamics of power and pleasure and understand the ways curiosity is disciplined and how it can be used as an instrument of social hierarchy.

Whether you have fully developed answers to these prompts or an interest (a curiosity, even) in learning how others might respond to them, we welcome you to this initiative.

Ways to Get Involved

Lecture Series

“[Feminist curiosity] seeks not to sensationalize or settle, but to honor and complexify. [It] is a curiosity-with rather than a curiosity-about, and as such it practices a listening-with over a listening-for.”
–Perry Zurn, "Feminist Curiosity" (2021)

Why study curiosity? Studying curiosity gets at the heart of how we construct (and contest) our knowledge environments—and therefore our worlds. In this talk, I begin by contextualizing the project of curiosity studies. I then turn to the orientations and disorientations that, I believe, should mark not only our study of curiosity but also our practice of curiosity. Curiosity is orienting and gets oriented. It points us in a direction, within an inherited system of roads and landmarks. Who asks questions, how, and about what is informed by our social political contexts (and struggles). But curiosity is also disorienting and can be disoriented. When we are curious, we often find ourselves losing our feet and the ground we thought certain crumbles beneath us. This step is important for liberatory projects, but also for grappling with a mysterious world. Attending to the how and why of dis/orientations is a crucial ethos of curiosity itself.

Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and LGBTQ (especially trans) studies, and has collaborated in psychology and network neuroscience. Author or editor of 8 books and more than 100 essays, Zurn’s work on curiosity includes Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021), Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (2022), and Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020).

Curiosity is often operationalized through language-mediated measures (self-report surveys, question-asking, and text-based tasks) that presume neurotypical speech and cognition, making the curiosity of many individuals with absent or minimal speech harder to recognize. My research seeks to expand how we understand and measure communication, aiming to recognize and support diverse expressions of curiosity that extend beyond conventional definitions. Through ROSCO (Rapid Online Sample of Communication), EVOCA (Exploration of Vocalizations), and other studies, my lab uses naturalistic, home-based methods to capture multimodal communication—including vocalizations, gestures, body movements, and augmentative technology use—that resist conventional categories yet reveal deep patterns of growth, attention, and learning. These approaches generate new scientific insight and invite more inclusive pedagogies: rethinking whose questions count, how we listen across modalities, and how classrooms and research practices can honor diverse ways of knowing.

Dr. Kristina (Kristy) Johnson is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, jointly appointed in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Communication Sciences & Disorders. She also holds a faculty appointment at the Yale School of Medicine. Her research focuses on individuals with complex neurodevelopmental differences, especially those with autism, intellectual disabilities, rare genetic disorders, and minimal spoken speech. She works at the intersection of science and engineering, specializing in personalized naturalistic studies, developmental science, digital healthcare, and augmentative technology.

Spring 2026 speakers will be announced soon!

What If? Talks

Short, lively talks where Barnard faculty communicate to colleagues and students about the spark behind their research—those “wait, what if…?” that opened a path of discovery. We want to hear about those generative questions, shifts in methodology, or reorientations of perspective that led to your innovative projects, books, experiments, and performances. Each session aims to highlight that first question, the intellectual journey that followed, and the conditions that kept curiosity alive as the project developed. Participating faculty members will receive a $250 research stipend.

Apply to present, or suggest a speaker at this link by Friday, December 5th.