Public Humanities

This blog post was written by Hannah Leavitt, Humanities Center Student Fellow This month, 100 years will have passed since the October Revolution of 1917, the uprising that shook Europe and demolished the Russian Empire and its monarchy. During the ensuing civil war, the rise of communist power, and the changes and chaos that Bolshevik …

This post was written by Holly Boud, Humanities Center Intern On Thursday, the Humanities Center was pleased to host Dr. Hester Oberman of the Arizona State University. She gave an incredible talk about the new and emerging field of medical humanities and its place in the medical field, especially in terms of healing. She emphasized …

This post was written by Matt Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center My initial motive for writing the blog post this week was to bring some attention to an event our BYU Humanities Center is hosting this Thursday, September 28th. Hester Oberman, of the University of Arizona’s Department of Religious Studies and Classics, is …

This post was written by Elisabeth Loveland, Humanities Center Student Fellow Humanities scholars are more or less challenged to cope, on an existential level, with an infinite volume of factoids and interpretations-on-said-factoids, all of which cannot be neatly jammed into your term paper’s bibliography, let alone your personal knowledge. You don’t have infinite years, you …

This post was written by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director of the Humanities Center If one reads academic news media like The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed—or, for that matter, The New York Times—one quickly ascertains that these aren’t the best of times for the humanities. Lending voice to that sentiment a few years ago, in 2014, …

This post was written by Brian Russell Roberts, Humanities Center Fellow. June 12, 2017 Since the BYU Humanities Center was founded in 2012, one of its greatest contributions to intellectual life in the Humanities College has been its support for several faculty research groups, ranging from Adaptation Studies to Jazz-Blues for the Humanities, from Derrida …

This post was written by Holly Boud, Humanities Center intern. I should preface this post by saying that I am spending two months touring the UK on a British literature and landscape tour. Everything that follows is reflective of this experience. This study abroad focuses on understanding the literature of Britain in different eras as well …

This post was written by Ed Cutler, HC Fellow, English Department An opinion piece in a recent New York Times carries a provocative title: “Not Leadership Material? Good. The World Needs Followers.” The author is Susan Cain, founder of Quiet Revolution, a for-profit company that aims to “unlock the power of introverts for the benefit …

This past weekend I celebrated a milestone birthday: I’m 80. Alright, shave three decades off that number, though in some ways I feel 80. Years ago, when a department colleague turned 50, his friends – or, perhaps, sworn enemies – taped a picture on his door of him lying in a coffin, smiling. I believe …

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 …