Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey reminds us that humanity's oldest stories are endlessly open to reinterpretation. Homer's epic has been retold by generations of storytellers to resonate with their particular context and audience. Retellings of The Odyssey across media continue that work today — from hip hop albums to graphic novels, plays, musicals and video games — giving new form to contemporary concerns about war, exile, morality, ethics, and ideas about home and belonging. Even when a cultural form is canonized, the desire to re-form, reclaim and reimagine persists.

The 2027-28 Society of Fellows theme approaches (re)formations both as a verb — focusing on adaptation, reuse,  translation and intertextuality as engines of critical inquiry and creation — and as a noun, referring to the social, political, institutional, physical and artistic forms shaped by those acts. Grounded in the Latin reformare (“to form again, change, or transform”), this framing reminds us that cultural forms are rarely as fixed as they appear. ‘Re-forming’ negotiates the space between convention and invention. What new meanings arise from recycling, remixing or mashing up past works, objects, ideas and practices? 

(Re)formations are critical practices that compel ethical scrutiny. While revisionist work holds the power to uncover suppressed truths, it can also co-opt or distort. Furthermore, as forms shift and circulate, shared understandings are reconfigured. What is preserved, what is lost, and what new possibilities emerge through these practices? Who has the authority to transform inherited forms, whose experiences become visible and whose are erased? (Re)formations may also involve the refusal of the terms an existing form imposes by reclaiming how conventions distribute power, authority and codes of belonging. 

The Global Arts + Humanities invites disciplinary and cross-disciplinary projects exploring the interplay between sources and iterations and/or the transformative potential of reforming existing structures. We welcome a wide spectrum of artistic and humanistic approaches including, but not limited to anthropology, architecture, classics, community engagement, dance, design, digital humanities, geography, history, literature, media studies, music, philosophy, public health, public policy, sociology, theatre and visual arts.