How and Why Language Changes

This post was written by Mark Davies, HC Fellow, Linguistics Department Why do languages change? The answers that some linguists tended to give 100-150 years ago strike us as being quite absurd nowadays. For example, they sometimes looked to the physical environment as a motivation for language change, such as the fact that the Germanic …

The Humanities, Medicine and Art in the Sixteenth Century

This post was written by Charlotte Stanford, HC Fellow, Department of Comparative Arts & Letters When I say I am a medievalist and that I am interested in the study of medicine, I often encounter skepticism—if not a frisson of actual horror. Wasn’t that an age that practiced bloodletting? That didn’t believe in bathing? That …

An Appreciation for Wonder-Driven Research

This post was written by Janis Nuckolls, HC Faculty Fellow As this is my last official post as a member of the first Humanities Center executive committee, I want to publicly thank (even though thanking seems paltry and inadequate) our founding director Matt Wickman, whose vision, wit, energy, eloquence, and excitement for ALL THINGS has …

Fences

This post was written by Andrew Rees, HC Undergraduate Student Fellow As I sit in the twilight of my undergraduate experience at BYU, I hope you will indulge me a little nostalgia. To do so, I’ll refer you to one of my childhood favorites: The Fellowship of the Ring and J.R.R. Tolkien’s timeless words: “The …

Sympathies and Natural Histories 

This post was written by Holly Boud, HC Intern “How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our political and social theories.” “The greatest benefit we owe to the …

Negotiating Mortality in Art

This post was written by Benjamin Jacob, HC Student Fellow Recently, I listened to a recording of the Choir at King’s College, Cambridge performing Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor. As it was the first time that I had listened to a requiem mass by any composer, I looked up an English translation of the …

Juan Rulfo’s Journey through Film

This post features the work of Douglas Weatherford, Spanish and Portuguese Department This year (2017) Mexico celebrates the centennial of one of its most beloved and iconic authors, Juan Rulfo (1917-1986). Although best known for two groundbreaking pieces of narrative fiction (El Llano en llamas, 1953 and Pedro Páramo, 1955), Rulfo was also an avid …

On Longing: The Peach of the Humanities

This post was written by Kristen Blair, HC Undergraduate Student Fellow In a moment of particularly moving emotion, William Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet bemoans his mother’s hasty transfer of affections. In his suffering, he says: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, How weary, stale, flat and …

Raising a Glass

This post was written by Holly Boud, HC intern Here I am, sitting on a stool in my kitchen in my run-down Orem apartment eating turkey bacon (God’s gift to mankind). The door of my room hangs unevenly on its hinges. My light is broken. My toilet bowl has a hard water ring that I …