Upon Receipt of My Diploma

A headline caught my eye while trolling the Internet for finals week memes that said, “An Invisible Artwork by Yves Klein Just Sold for More than $1 Million at Sotheby’s.” The article was quick to clarify that the private European collector with the winning bid didn’t buy empty space, per se, but rather a paper …

2021

The Humanities Center held its 9th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday, October 29th at 3:00 PM in the Education in Zion Theater. This year’s event featured 6 undergraduate students from the College of Humanities and their research. Candace Brown: “Hear Him: Listening to the Holy Face” The diptych–an important format used by Netherlandish Renaissance …

2020

The Humanities Center held its 8th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday, October 23rd at 3:00 PM via YouTube livestream. This year’s event featured 6 undergraduate students from the College of Humanities and their research. Claire Gillett: “The Folkway Podcast: Preserving and Perpetuating Canadian Fiber Art Traditions Through Digital Storytelling” The maritime provinces of Atlantic …

Expression Through the Humanities

When I was younger, I lived next door to Johanna Harmon, a renowned oil painter whose living room functioned as a large art studio. The sunlight spilled in through the wall of windows, illuminating enormous canvases scattered throughout the space. I remember looking around the room, fascinated by the mixes of different hues on the …

Dear Mom

Dear Mom~ The other day I read an article in the news about parents in Tennessee and elsewhere rallying to have books removed from their teens’ school libraries—books that reference race, sexuality, or the Holocaust in ways that made them (the parents) uncomfortable. I wondered how those kids felt, watching their parents on social media …

“Quick to Observe”: Or, Desultory Thoughts on Seeing and Learning

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s much-loved “Pied Beauty” (a “curtal sonnet” composed in 1877) fits the season, as spring begins to arrest our attention: GLORY be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, …

“Not Even the Alphabet or the Multiplication Tables …”

The week before last, the Humanities Center held a discussion motivated by the never-ending “crisis in the humanities” and centered on how three colleagues have seen their fields, students, and jobs evolve over the past decade or two. These colleagues – Daryl Lee (French and Italian), Kristin Matthews (English), and Rex Nielson (Spanish and Portuguese) …