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Why Support Research at BYU?
As an undergraduate I didn’t have much feeling for research, not as such, although I did have an affection for ideas and a deep gratitude to teachers who helped foster and allowed me to express them. At some point in my education I began to recognize subtle distinctions between “learning” and “research”—the former being, in my youthful experience, an activity associated with individual classes and the latter extending well beyond them, gathering into its orbit entire series of classes, large expenditures of time and imagination, and crafting through force of repetition—of disciplinary habit—the authority of specialization. Research represented a more intensive form of learning. Actually, it’s more than that: research involves not only learning, but also something like a professional identity. I’ve sported several such identities over the years: “I’m a theorist,” I said when I first began graduate school; “I’m an eighteenth centuryist,” I said when I was completing my PhD; “I specialize in Scottish literary and intellectual history of the eighteenth century and after,” I said as I was working toward tenure; “I consider myself a scholarly migrant, wandering between areas of specialization,” I now say. All the old specializations are still with me, but the identity has changed, and keeps changing. Of course, “learning” is a vaster category than my simple dichotomy suggests. But let me stay with that dichotomy as a way of making a larger point. If we reflect for a moment on professional identities we can probably agree that they are important if also problematic. In most cases, they’re cultivated from larger societies of which scholars are part—societies whose histories and exigencies exceed the parameters of individual institutions. What is “hot” or “important”...
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Festival, Chaos, and Creativity
During Halloween last year, I decided to dress to the nines. With the help of a friend, I donned a blue cardigan, a red cape, a few dyed cloth strips, and a pocket-watch-necklace in order to become Marvel’s Doctor Strange. (For those who know me, there was really no better option, and I’m discovering that it’s hard to find a similar match for my physical features and body type this year…maybe Gumbi…) However, there was one complication last year that I hadn’t considered: I was the only person who dressed up. I didn’t realize while at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, that it isn’t a cultural custom to dress up for Halloween at work—especially not as a popular film character who contained no element of gothic horror. Yet there I was, playing an American superhero among my perfectly proper British coworkers. Fun. (Okay, it really was; I had a great time.) As Halloween comes closer now, I can’t help but consider again those differences of festival culture; more importantly, I also find myself wondering why we continue to celebrate festival at all. What function does festival play during a time when harvest is no longer a direct part of life? Is it, as Guy Debord argues, an artifact of ancient cyclical time that has been simulated in our day with “travesty of dialogue” and “parody of gift” in order to commodify celebration (and time itself) in the service of capitalist structures?1 Perhaps. But we might cast a more generous light on it, if only to see what kinds of shadows are cast on the other side. In so doing, we might begin to see where time is still yet cyclical, and...
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On Vulnerability and (Vicarious) Experience
On May 2, 2018, my view of life and my role within it was transformed when I received a phone call from the emergency room at Utah Valley Hospital. My 14-year old daughter had been hit by a car. The distracted driver had failed to notice her in the crosswalk. Though he only clipped her with his sideview mirror, the force of the impact was sufficient to break off the end of her femur. The injury has since required surgery and months of physical therapy, but the prognosis is good. Had the car been only a few inches closer, the injuries would surely have been more severe and potentially fatal. The first days after the accident I didn’t allow myself to feel. Instead I busied myself with the details—canceling our planned flights to Russia, researching the injury, finding doctors, trying to figure out the insurance. But once the “business” was settled, I was humbled both by the miracle of my daughter’s relative fortune and by this latest reminder of mortality and my vulnerability to it. How close I had come to losing my child! I admit that in the weeks following the accident, I often asked, “Why me?” But the question was meant neither as reproach nor complaint. Why had my daughter survived this accident when others have not? What had I done to deserve this miracle? And the answer was unsettling: I had done nothing. I could do nothing. In 2017, Chief Justice Roberts was asked to give a commencement speech at his son’s middle school. I was struck by the message. Instead of wishing the graduates good luck, he instead wished them bad luck: “I wish you...
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Literary Arboretum
While visiting my longtime friend and former roommate Ella1 at her home in Folsom, California this past summer, her family graciously took me along with them to visit the nearby Muir Woods National Monument. Ella and I were catching a redeye out of San Francisco that night, but had quite a bit of time to kill, so her mom made turkey sandwiches for everybody and we all packed into their minivan, prepared with freshly filled water bottles and small packages of trail mix for the ride before of us. I should make a disclaimer here: I had been anxiously waiting to see a redwood tree since I was a kid, when my mom would sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” to me while strumming along the melody on her acoustic guitar. The “redwood forest” of the song always seemed mysterious and primordial, mystical and untouchable. Sure, I had seen trees and loved being around them while growing up in my home state of Georgia, but now I was going to see Trees. I was about to behold one of the most renowned and revered species, the Sequoia sempervirens. When you enter Muir Woods, all you can really do is tilt your head upwards, where you look into eternity; the massive trunk of the redwood splits infinitely into smaller and smaller branches, unfathomably. As you walk through the forest, you hardly dare to whisper. The trees in all their vivid viridity seem to gently demand your reverence as you observe their spiritual magnitude—so vast and superior to your own. While I observed this holiness, from the soft carpets of illuminated clover and sprouting fern fronds erupting from the...
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Events
RVSG Guest Lecture: Paul Keen
When: Thursday, Oct 25, 2018
Where: 4188 JFSB
more event details ->
"Conversations": Paul Keen
When: Friday, Oct 26, 2018
Where: 4010 JFSB
more event details ->
ORCA Symposium 2018
When: Friday, Oct 26, 2018
Where: 4010 JFSB
more event details ->
Humanities Center Blog
Why Support Research at BYU?
As an undergraduate I didn’t have much feeling for research, not as such, although I did have an affection for ideas and a deep gratitude to teachers who helped foster and allowed me to express ...
continue reading ->
Festival, Chaos, and Creativity
During Halloween last year, I decided to dress to the nines. With the help of a friend, I donned a blue cardigan, a red cape, a few dyed cloth strips, and a pocket-watch-necklace in order ...
continue reading ->
On Vulnerability and (Vicarious) Experience
On May 2, 2018, my view of life and my role within it was transformed when I received a phone call from the emergency room at Utah Valley Hospital. My 14-year old daughter had been ...
continue reading ->
Media Gallery
