Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
Hi, I’m Bobbe May, and I’m just hitting my year mark of being (and loving my work as) the Associate Director of the BYU Humanities Center. My academic training is not in the humanities, but from day one something about this job just felt right. As I have reflected on why this could be, my …
I’ve been listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s biography by Robert D. Richardson, subtitled: “The Mind on Fire.” Richardson wrote an intellectual biography on Henry Thoreau as well, called: “A Life of the Mind.” Perhaps because those phrases were foremost in my subconscious—resonating with me, exciting me, and providing motivation during the past year as I’ve …
Few concepts in academia carry as much negative weight as the notion of the academic silo. Indeed, would any professor welcome the suggestion or even implication that they work in an academic silo? At the most recent meeting of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), this phrase seemed to be on the tip …
It was BYU’s university conference week in late August 2011, and I was feeling a little nostalgic. And anxious. I was at the college meeting for faculty for what I anticipated was the last time. My family had returned a couple months earlier from Aberdeen, Scotland – the second of our half-yearly stints where I …
A headline caught my eye while trolling the Internet for finals week memes that said, “An Invisible Artwork by Yves Klein Just Sold for More than $1 Million at Sotheby’s.” The article was quick to clarify that the private European collector with the winning bid didn’t buy empty space, per se, but rather a paper …
This is my last semester at BYU–last week, actually–and as happens with any big change, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting and a lot of speculating about what the future will bring. In my poetry class, our most recent assignment was to translate a portion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which we’ve been reading throughout …
When I was younger, I lived next door to Johanna Harmon, a renowned oil painter whose living room functioned as a large art studio. The sunlight spilled in through the wall of windows, illuminating enormous canvases scattered throughout the space. I remember looking around the room, fascinated by the mixes of different hues on the …
Dear Mom~ The other day I read an article in the news about parents in Tennessee and elsewhere rallying to have books removed from their teens’ school libraries—books that reference race, sexuality, or the Holocaust in ways that made them (the parents) uncomfortable. I wondered how those kids felt, watching their parents on social media …
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s much-loved “Pied Beauty” (a “curtal sonnet” composed in 1877) fits the season, as spring begins to arrest our attention: GLORY be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, …
The week before last, the Humanities Center held a discussion motivated by the never-ending “crisis in the humanities” and centered on how three colleagues have seen their fields, students, and jobs evolve over the past decade or two. These colleagues – Daryl Lee (French and Italian), Kristin Matthews (English), and Rex Nielson (Spanish and Portuguese) …