Public Humanities

The following post was written by Heather Belnap Jensen, a Faculty Fellow at the Center.  “Academics: forget about public engagement, stay in your ivory towers,” blasted the headline from an opinion piece published in The Guardian last month. While James Mulholland, an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, is convinced specialization can …

As I’ve reflected on the past in preparation for a new year, I have thought carefully about my academic pursuits during graduate school, and my thoughts have been poignantly centered on the phrase “never forget.” I started out 2015 taking a theory class focused on trauma and memory, taught by BYU professor Trent Hickman. In …

The following post was written by Matthew Wickman, Director of the Humanities Center. America has spoken: organized religion is uncool. Or (even?) less cool than it used to be. While America is still a predominantly religious nation, a recent Pew Research Center survey reports that a shrinking percentage of Americans believes in God, attends worship …

The following post was written by Andrew Rees, a student Fellow for the Center.  I have been deeply troubled by the growing anti-Islamic sentiment across the United States in recent weeks. Calls to bar entrance to Middle Eastern refugees and even all Muslims have been met, not with apprehension, but with widespread support across the …

The following post was written by Blair Bateman, a Faculty Fellow for the Center. At the University of Minnesota, where I earned my PhD, the approximate equivalent for BYU’s College of Humanities is known as the College of Liberal Arts, as it is at many other universities. In fact, the word “liberal” is commonly used at …

Great cities ravaged by bombs. Images of children drowning in the ocean. Photographs of devastated victims unable to process horrific acts. Pathetically charged narratives begging readers and/or listeners to feel enough to incite them to action. Each of these examples is used as a way to evoke a sympathetic reaction from a party separate from …

Friday, November 13 was a day of good fortune for the BYU Humanities Center. We held our Annual Symposium, and our guest, Caroline Levine (of the University of Wisconsin–Madison), could not have been more gracious, engaging, or interesting. But that same evening, a terrorist cell affiliated with ISIS launched a coordinated attack in Paris, detonating …

The following post was written by Dale Pratt, a Fellow for the Center.  Almost exactly four hundred years ago this month, Miguel de Cervantes published the second volume of his masterpiece, Don Quixote. The 1605 publication of the first volume had made him famous but not rich (he had sold the rights to the book …

The following post is written by Rachel Cannon, an undergraduate Fellow at the Center.  Growing up, in school, I never liked the idea of someone editing my work. It felt intrusive, and my prideful self so intent on perfection didn’t want to be told how many mistakes I’d made and how imperfect my work was. …

Originally perceived to be a psychological disorder, nostalgia, which is rooted in the Greek words nostos (longing) and algos (pain), was explored as a way to explain soldiers’ feelings of homesickness during war. As we’ve progressed since the seventeenth century conception of nostalgia, nostalgia has taken on many forms. Nostalgia has certainly contributed to the marketplace, …