Public Humanities

When editors of a book on the history of the Mexican novel asked me to contribute an essay on the longest books written during the 20th century, I accepted. There was no reason not to, and I was the right guy for the job. My work in historical fiction and high modernist fiction in Spanish …

There I was, a rhetorician reading poetry. I found this amusing given the disciplinary history of rhetoric and poetry. Aristotle wrote a treatise called The Rhetoric and another called The Poetics because those were separate fields for him. However, the two exist between the same covers on my shelf as The Rhetoric and the Poetics …

January has returned, trailing clouds of new year’s resolutions. My return to campus coincides with a return to the MLA Convention for the first time in more than a decade. I know that for many in the college, the yearly MLA gathering signals an important temporal point on the academic calendar while providing valuable professional …

My title is not mere alliteration. Christmas, climate change, and communication have more in common than just the letter “c.” What else unites this holiday, hot topic, and humanistic discipline? For starters, climate change referentials are hidden throughout the holiday hymns. We sing “Joy to the world” and “Let earth receive her King!” (#201, emphasis …

Welcome back from Thanksgiving break, and best of luck as you move into the wind-up phase of the semester. I promise to keep this blog entry brief—proceed with confidence. I’ve been musing on confidence and its origins. Etymology provides no sure guide to words’ current meanings, I know, even if words do seem to remember …

As Thanksgiving celebrations take place this week, my thoughts have repeatedly turned to gratitude—what it is, what it means, and perhaps more importantly, how to express it. The Oxford English Dictionary defines gratitude as “a warm sense of appreciation of kindness received, involving a feeling of goodwill towards the benefactor and a desire to do …

When I tell people that I am a philosopher, I sometimes see an inchoate question behind their eyes. What is philosophy? Is it the same thing as psychology? Is it old men wearing togas? Where does philosophy fit into the life of the university? The university is filled with those who seek truth. They seek …

In spring 2021, a Saudi man named Sultan Aldeet netted himself one million Emirati dirhams (roughly $273,000 USD) plus a symbolic cloak and ring. His achievement? Winning first place on Prince of Poets, an American Idol-inspired TV contest in the United Arab Emirates between classical Arabic poets.[1] It airs every other year from Abu Dhabi …

A number of years ago I visited with a therapist on a weekly basis, discussing the constant, heavy feeling I couldn’t shake off. I was a newly returned missionary, and I was struggling to return back to school while two of my family members were hospitalized and one of my grand-parents had recently passed away. …

This past summer, I went on a study abroad trip to Portugal. Prior to my travels, I had very limited knowledge of the country. I could not recite a list of its famous people, nor could I produce the names of its top tourist attractions. I couldn’t talk about its food, its citizens or its …