Humanities Center

Patterns crawl up the walls of the Blue Mosque. Painted vines spring from ceramic tiles in endless loops, flowers blooming between them. Intricate spirals originate at the bottom of the wall and repeat over and over until they reach the arching dome high above, where blue, red, and gold swirl together in stunning symmetry. A …

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 …

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 …