Interested students are encouraged to participate in Humanities Center research groups. Research groups provide opportunities for students to interact with faculty as intellectual peers. To qualify for participation, students should have some background in the topic covered by the research group.
Current research groups:
- Education for Leadership: This group is interested in elevating the quality of education for all grade levels, elementary through post-secondary, and tying language arts education to leadership development as the most promising way to accomplish this goal.
- Experiential Humanities: The general focus of this research group will be exploring the impact/value of the humanities in the wider world. Specifically, what is unique about a humanities education that equips people to contribute in civic and professional life?
- Humanities Plus Haiti Health Initiative: This group’s project aims to improve HHI’s service and research in Haiti through a postcolonial analysis of their past and current efforts. By extension, other cross-cultural philanthropic and academic activities will benefit from this constructive critique, and a bit more attention will be shown to the neglected nation of Haiti.
- Jazz, Blues, and Beyond: This group is comprised of scholars involved in the ever-growing body of research on the music of the African diaspora (jazz, rock and roll, the blues, reggae, cumbia, salsa, bossa nova, samba, tango, hip hop, etc.), as well as literature, improvisation, art, dance, film, politics, history, and spirituality as they relate to black music.
- Medieval and Renaissance Studies: MARS (Medieval and Renaissance Studies) members come to us from across several disciplines and colleges to share our interest with the historic period from the end of antiquity (roughly ca. 500) down to the development of the early modern world (roughly up through the seventeenth century).
- Psychoanalysis Reading Group: This group’s purpose is to revisit key psychoanalytic texts and discover new insights into the ways psychoanalysis still speaks to questions of what it means to be human.
- Romantic and Victorian: Romantic and Victorian is a faculty research group that meets several times per year to discuss: 1)British literature of the “long Romantic” and Victorian periods (1750-1900) 2)Transnational Romanticism 3)Romantic and Victorian aesthetics theory, and philosophy. Most semesters the group gathers once to discuss the research of a group member and once to workshop with a visiting scholar.
- Spirituality and Imagination: The purpose of this group is to convene scholars whose work purports to break down the barriers between “spiritual” and “material” realities, and between theology and humanities disciplines.
- Theology & Humanities: This group looks to take up, in a more extensive and reflective way, theological works of broad impact across multiple fields – literary studies, philosophy, theory, culture and gender studies, and more.
- Translation Studies: In the age of globalization, Translation Studies has emerged to meet the dramatically increased need not only for the practical translation and interpretation of texts and documents, but for transcultural and transnational understanding and communication.
- Women’s Studies (WSTAR): The Women’s Studies Teaching and Research Group helps to further its members’ training in contemporary theories and practices related to women’s studies. We schedule events and activities that involve presentations and workshops conducted by eminent scholars in the field of women’s studies as well as by members of the group. We also sponsor visiting lectures and conduct workshops for work-in-progress by members of the group.
If you are interested in being involved, contact Matthew Wickman for more information.