The Catholic University of America Sociology Professor Brandon Vaidyanathan recently received a $3.89 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation for an interdisciplinary project that includes a first-of-its-kind, large-scale international study of beauty.
The grant will support the interdisciplinary initiative launching this fall, “Can Beauty Save the World?: Aesthetic Engagement Among the Spiritual But Not Religious,” which aims to respond to Dostoyevsky’s famous question that is the project’s namesake.
“The project will serve as a powerful catalyst to spur scholars, practitioners, and communities to take beauty seriously as a force for good in the world,” said Professor Vaidyanathan. The grant co-leader is English lecturer and visiting research fellow at Catholic University, novelist and nonfiction author Tara Isabella Burton. Other project co-investigators include Anjan Chatterjee (University of Pennsylvania), Katie Bank (University of Birmingham), Rebekah Wallace (University of Oxford), and Stephen Bullivant (St Mary’s University).
The research will span disciplines including literature, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to better understand how individual and collective experiences of beauty may contribute to creating a sense of meaning and transcendence. The target population is the “spiritual but not religious,” a rapidly growing demographic that seeks alternative avenues for transcendence in a secular age.
The pioneering nationally representative quantitative research on the general population’s aesthetic experiences in the United States and United Kingdom will be paired with in-depth fieldwork at five sites of collective engagement, including immersive theater and events such as the Venice Carnival. The research will also employ wearable technology to measure the physiological impact of aesthetic engagement at workshops led by a Grammy-nominated choir to generate new insights into the relationship between beauty, well-being, and spirituality.
The findings will inform books, journal articles, popular publications, and public events to spark a global conversation about beauty in the many ways it is manifested as essential to human flourishing. The project will also support new coursework at the University, beginning this fall with beauty-focused classes designed by the grant’s co-leads.
