What: BYU Humanities Center book manuscript mentoring workshop Brief description: The BYU Humanities Center will support a faculty member (or collaborative team of faculty members) working toward the completion of a book manuscript by paying two reviewers of the scholar’s choosing to read the manuscript and offer substantive feedback. One of these reviewers will be …
The Winding Road to “Faith and Imagination”
I’m going to interweave about four stories here. Let me begin with one of which I’m not terribly proud. I went on the job market the fall of 1999. It was a shockingly good year in my field, with a number of great jobs listed, and I was in a surprisingly strong position, with a …
From Wax Cylinders to WeChat: The Strange and Circuitous Journey of Berthold Laufer’s Chinese Recordings
By the early years of the twentieth century, China had suffered unduly at the hands of European, American, and Japanese colonialism. The Chinese citizenry had been deeply dissatisfied with the way the Qing dynasty—itself a foreign dynasty ruled by Manchus—had failed to protect China from the encroachment of increasing numbers of foreign powers. By the …
Research Group Proposals 2021
November 1 is the proposal deadline for research groups supported by the Humanities Center. Research groups are one of the best things the Humanities Center sponsors, and this is the time of year when we take single- or multi- (i.e., three-) year proposals. These proposals must include a rationale, a list of prospective group members, …
Self-Confrontation for Self-Liberation
As I start the year 2021, I think back on my almost twenty-five and a half years of life and of being born into a time of increasing calls for awareness, equity, and justice for human beings, regardless of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc. I think about hard conversations, different realities that various groups of …