Public Humanities

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 …

On February 24, 2015, Jim Leach, the ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, visited Brigham Young University’s campus to give a forum address. As an NEH chairman, Leach advocated the importance of the humanities in a nation shifting its focus to the STEM field, offering an important defense of the humanities as …

The following post was written by Mark Davies, a professor of Linguistics and English Language and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Corpora (large collections of highly-searchable texts) are obviously useful for linguistic analysis. But as I’ll try to show in this short blog post, they are also potentially very useful for research on …

The following post was written by Laura Catharine Smith, a professor of German and Slavic Languages and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Each year, faculty in the humanities face the same question from students: Why should I get a degree in the German/French/Philosophy/Classics, etc.? The question is generally followed up with a remark stating …