Starting this month, Barnard College students will have the opportunity to learn from scholars who examine curiosity across multiple disciplines and methods. These lectures are part of The Curiosity Initiative, a multi-year series of public talks and communities of practice designed to explore the conditions that shape people’s desire to know, learn, and explore with one another.

The newly-launched Curiosity Initiative, spearheaded by the Center for Engaged Pedagogy and the Office of the Provost with generous support from Jane Jelenko ‘70, will offer Barnard students opportunities to explore the complexities of curiosity from a range of disciplinary perspectives and across many different practices. It's one of the many ways Barnard is preparing students to encounter unfamiliar ideas, challenge what they already know, and pursue questions with openness and courage.

“Our aim with The Curiosity Initiative is to create venues for our students to share the individual and field-specific curiosity that each of us carry,” said Provost and Dean of the Faculty Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “We will then bring those insights into conversation, so that students can learn from one another’s perspectives and deepen their sense of connection. Through this process, we will be encouraging our whole community to engage with complex ideas and to cultivate curiosity about what is new, different, challenging, and unfamiliar – always in ways that help us grow together.”

“I'm particularly excited for us to engage with and build on the transdisciplinary field of inquiry known as curiosity studies,” said Senior Associate Director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy Alex Pittman. “This field has been attuned not only to the practical aspects of how people pursue their desires to learn, but also to what we might call the social and political dynamics of curiosity—or the ways that we have to think critically about the interpersonal relations and institutional contexts that shape our abilities to conduct inquiry. The programming that makes up The Curiosity Initiative aims to hold both of these parts together and to draw the insights of faculty, students, and staff into conversation about the practice and conditions of curiosity today.” 

Be Bold, Be Curious

Over the next two academic years, the program will invite the Barnard community to ask bold questions: What does curiosity look like across different academic fields? How do professors nurture curiosity in classrooms, labs, and studios? And how do we reshape our curiosity when we are caring for others or navigating moments of conflict?

The Curiosity Initiative will highlight and build on the many ways our community is already engaging curiosity as a pedagogical practice, a driver of scientific discovery, a theme in children’s literature, an object of research, a response to the challenges of new knowledge, a contested resource in the attention economy, and a shared social practice.

Students will have multiple opportunities to participate, beginning with a public lecture series. The first event will feature Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, on October 14, delivering a talk titled “Curiosity: Its Orientations and Disorientations.”

“In this talk, I begin by contextualizing the project of curiosity studies and then turn to the orientations and disorientations that, I believe, should mark not only our study of curiosity but also our practice of curiosity,” Zurn said. “Curiosity is orienting and gets oriented. It points us in a direction, within an inherited system of roads and landmarks…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.”

Beginning in Spring 2026, Barnard faculty will launch “What If?” Talks which are short dynamic presentations where they share the sparks of curiosity in their research that grew into books, experiments, performances, and new lines of inquiry.

Also this spring, Faculty Communities of Practice will bring together members of Barnard’s world-class faculty to explore the many ways curiosity shapes their scholarship and their teaching.

Through the Student Communities of Practice, Barnard undergraduates will be encouraged to cultivate curiosity as a habit, not only in their academic work, but also in how they connect with peers, build relationships, and engage across differences.

The College will host a Barnard Bold Conference in Spring 2027, featuring a poster session to showcase students' work throughout the course of this initiative.