Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
Friday, November 13 was a day of good fortune for the BYU Humanities Center. We held our Annual Symposium, and our guest, Caroline Levine (of the University of Wisconsin–Madison), could not have been more gracious, engaging, or interesting. But that same evening, a terrorist cell affiliated with ISIS launched a coordinated attack in Paris, detonating …
Many faculty, staff, and students at BYU were first introduced to Jazz and the Art of Civic Life with a presentation in 2013 by BYU professor Greg Clark and his guest jazz artists Loren Schoenberg and Jonathan Batiste (Batiste has since become the band leader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). One year later, Dr. …
The following post was written by Dale Pratt, a Fellow for the Center. Almost exactly four hundred years ago this month, Miguel de Cervantes published the second volume of his masterpiece, Don Quixote. The 1605 publication of the first volume had made him famous but not rich (he had sold the rights to the book …
The following post is written by Rachel Cannon, an undergraduate Fellow at the Center. Growing up, in school, I never liked the idea of someone editing my work. It felt intrusive, and my prideful self so intent on perfection didn’t want to be told how many mistakes I’d made and how imperfect my work was. …
Originally perceived to be a psychological disorder, nostalgia, which is rooted in the Greek words nostos (longing) and algos (pain), was explored as a way to explain soldiers’ feelings of homesickness during war. As we’ve progressed since the seventeenth century conception of nostalgia, nostalgia has taken on many forms. Nostalgia has certainly contributed to the marketplace, …
The following post was written by Chelsea Connelly, a student Fellow at the Center. As an employee of the library and an art history major, I am practically a religious devotee of the Harold B. Lee Library. I spend the majority of my school day there. Every semester since my freshman year, I have either …
In an effort to enact orthography reform during the nineteenth century, Brigham Young sought to implement a new phonetic alphabet for learning. Ultimately deciding, through the recommendation of Willard Richards, to separate from using any traditional characters in the new phonetic alphabet, Young allowed George D. Watt to create the Deseret Alphabet. This information is …
The following post was written by Janis Nuckolls, a Faculty Fellow for the Center. While doing research for my PhD dissertation in a remote location in Amazonian Ecuador among Runa people, I had many amazing experiences. However, one experience in particular continues to be vivid. My friends and consultants had invited me to accompany them …
In a powerful scene in James MacPherson’s Ossian poems, the king mourns the loss of his son in battle: “My eyes are blind with tears; but memory beams on my heart. How can I relate the mournful death of the head of the people! Prince of the warriors, Oscur, my son, shall I see thee …
As the humanities and, more narrowly, literary studies suffer through something of a present-day identity crisis—as the number of majors dwindle, and as literary scholars migrate into media studies, the environmental humanities, and other fields—literary traditionalists seem increasingly given to creative defenses of the value of their work. This has been brought to mind recently …