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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The American Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ of Arts and Sciences will release a special issue of ¶Ùæ»å²¹±ô³Ü²õ dedicated to the Humanities. The Spring 2006 edition of the quarterly journal will appear in mid-April.

The new issue maps the development and evolution of seven humanities disciplines in the 21st century. The seven disciplines traced in this issue are: American Literature, Comparative Literature, History, Art History, African American Studies, Law and the Humanities, and Philosophy.

"Seismic shifts have altered individual disciplines in the humanities in the course of the twentieth century," writes Patricia Meyer Spacks, Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ president and consulting editor for the issue. Those transformations "can change our cultural heritage and thus our grasp of what it means to live in the world."

The ¶Ùæ»å²¹±ô³Ü²õ issue includes essays by Spacks, Steven Marcus, Anthony Grafton, Andrew Delbanco, Pauline Yu, Thomas Crow, Gerald Early, Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson, and Dagfinn Føllesdal and Michael Friedman.

The Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾'s Humanities Initiative focuses on the new and increasingly complex challenges that are reshaping conditions for the humanities in the United States. One component of that initiative is the creation of the Humanities Indicators, a prototype set of data that will provide a comprehensive picture of the state of the humanities in the United States. The Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ recently received a three-year $701,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the Humanities Indicators Project. In addition to compiling data about the humanities, the Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ will continue to provide qualitative analysis of the state of the humanities and the trends that affect them.

¶Ùæ»å²¹±ô³Ü²õ was founded in 1955 as the Journal of the Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ and was established as a quarterly in 1958. It draws on the enormous intellectual capacity of the American Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾, whose Fellows are among the nation's most prominent thinkers in the arts, sciences, and the humanities, as well as the full range of professions and public life. Features in the magazine include fiction, poetry, and a Notes section with original works by distinguished members of the American Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾. ¶Ùæ»å²¹±ô³Ü²õ is published by the MIT Press.