The Capacity of Literature to Develop Empathy

The following post was written by Blair Bateman, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Earlier this semester I had the opportunity to attend a Humanities Center Conversation on capacity of literature to develop empathy for others. In preparation for the meeting, participants were invited to read a …

Quotidiana.org

Among his many teaching goals when he arrived at BYU in 2004, Professor Patrick Madden wanted to expose creative writing students to far more classical essays than they were used to (often they were used to zero), and he wanted to avoid costly, unwieldy coursepacks. His solution was an online anthology of public-domain essays (originally published before 1923) …

Utah Literacy Project

The Utah Literacy Project is a door-to-door survey initiated by Wendy Baker Smemoe, assistant professor of English language and linguistics, with Brad Wilcox in the BYU McKay School of Education and Russell Warne, assistant professor of psychology at Utah Valley University. The survey includes questions about the ability to read prose, numbers, documents, and information on computers. The …

French Summer Camp and French Teacher’s Institute

French Summer Camp Each year the Department of French and Italian sponsors a thirteen-day French Summer Camp for high-school students. The French Summer Camp has been held on the BYU Campus every June since 2010. Last year, seventy-two high-school students attended the 2014 camp. Participants came from across the United States (fourteen states) and from …

Frederick G. Williams: In English and Portuguese

During his service as an LDS temple president in Recife, Brazil (from 2009-2012), Professor Frederick G. Williams of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese gave public lectures in Portuguese on Dr. Frederick G. Williams, Counselor to the Prophet Joseph Smith. Since returning home from his mission, Professor Williams has given the same lecture in English …

Annual Symposium

On Friday, February 20th, Eric Hayot will be on campus as the guest at our Humanities Center Annual Symposium. Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State, and while much of his work is in Chinese he is also a major commentator on the humanities, with a great deal of wide-reaching (and very …