Civility and the Humanities

On February 24, 2015, Jim Leach, the ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, visited Brigham Young University’s campus to give a forum address. As an NEH chairman, Leach advocated the importance of the humanities in a nation shifting its focus to the STEM field, offering an important defense of the humanities as …

The Importance of Collocates

The following post was written by Mark Davies, a professor of Linguistics and English Language and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Corpora (large collections of highly-searchable texts) are obviously useful for linguistic analysis. But as I’ll try to show in this short blog post, they are also potentially very useful for research on …

Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Bandung Conference

Brian Russell Roberts is a Humanities Center Faculty Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Central Java, Indonesia. With Keith Foulcher (Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney), he has written Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference, forthcoming from Duke University Press, Spring 2016. …

Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century

The following post was written by Laura Catharine Smith, a professor of German and Slavic Languages and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Each year, faculty in the humanities face the same question from students: Why should I get a degree in the German/French/Philosophy/Classics, etc.? The question is generally followed up with a remark stating …

Public Humanities

The Humanities Center’s Public Humanities page is an attempt to document the vast public efforts made by BYU faculty in the Humanities College. Included in the page is an impressive list of affiliated faculty–that is, faculty with some kind of public humanities presence over the past five years. Some of this work has been enabled by …

Onward and Upward

The following post was written by Andy Nelson, one of the Humanities Center’s Snow Fellows. As graduation approaches—just over one month away—I have had several questions on my mind. Have I made the most of my four years as an undergraduate? Do I really want to spend two more years doing graduate work? Will my …

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 …

Charlie Hebdo and the Question of Media

On January 7, 2015, two gunmen entered the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve members of the staff. Further attacks on police and civilians ensued. Quickly branded in the US as France’s equivalent to 9/11, the incident incited debate over a wide range of issues: religious extremism, cultural conflict, political policies …

Freedom, Censorship, and Charlie Hebdo

As I listened to news of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, my first reaction was shock and condemnation. But, as events unfolded and news continued to pour out, I realized that blame might not be so easy to place. Of course, the attack was a tragedy as is every loss of human life, especially by …