Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
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 …
The following post was written by Tamara Pace Thomson, a student Fellow at the Center. Recently, in the Stanford Magazine for alumni, I read an interview with Professor Alexander Nemerov, who was a professor of art history at Stanford from 1992–2001 before teaching at Yale for eleven years. He returned to Stanford in 2013 and …
The following post was written by Brian Russell Roberts, a Faculty Fellow at the Center. 14 September 2015 In April 2014, one of the BYU Humanities Center’s research groups hosted Yale English professor Wai Chee Dimock. During Professor Dimock’s visit to campus, she graciously sat down for an interview with our Humanities Center Director, Matt …
Edith Sand and Victor Lavy of Tel Aviv University conducted a study about unconscious gender bias in teachers grading elementary students. They concluded that teachers, who obviously know the gender of their students, give lower grades to girls and higher grades to boys than outside graders who do not know the gender of those they …
This fall semester, the BYU Humanities Center begins its fourth year. I accepted the position of Founding Director of the Center in June of 2012, and prior to the Center’s official launch I decided to familiarize myself with a range of new work across the humanities. More important, I felt I needed to learn about …
The threat of robots overtaking the workforce and making humans superfluous would seem ludicrous decades ago. Now, while still seemingly a stretch, it doesn’t quite hold the same level of outlandishness as before. For example, J.P. Wright discussed his shifting job as a locomotive engineer. He states that the work that was once done by …
This post was written by Bert Fuller, who is graduating from BYU’s Comparative Studies MA program and beginning his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto this fall. Last March Daryl Lee of the French Department at Brigham Young University caught me reading Greg Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an …
When asked, “What is your view of the function of poetry in today’s society?”, poet Mark Strand replied, “It’s not going to change the world, but I believe if every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we’d live in a much more humane and decent world. Poetry …
The following post was written by Matthew Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center. I recently returned from two events related to humanities centers and institutes. The first was the annual conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, a gathering that convenes some two hundred scholars from around the world. Attendees range from …