Humanities Center

Prologue In her song, “Little Good News”, Canadian songstress Ann Murray sang about the turbulence that marked the 70s and 80s. Her line in the chorus “We all could use a little good news today” seems all the more relevant for our time nearly 40 years later. In recent years, divisions have been increasing in …

I sit under the front window in my apartment. Sunlight filters in through a broken blind my landlord hasn’t seen fit to fix, and the rug is warm under my outstretched palm. It is October now, and gloom seems to coat the ground alongside the leaves that whisper-skitter across the pavement. The colors of fall …

“There’s an interplay,” says Kevin Blankinship, assistant professor of Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, “between what feels so different [about the past] and what is similar to us [in the present].” Although connecting the issues and challenges of 2020 to medieval Arabic poetry may seem a tall order for most, …

Apocalyptic scenes of forest fires, reddened atmospheres thick with ash, scorched earth, and people in flight have filled our news media recently. I was particularly awed by a photo published a few weeks ago of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, also known as a cumulonimbus flammagenitus cloud, which formed over the devastating California Creek Fire located just …

I thought myself into a slightly uncomfortable corner the other day. I was reading about the religious observances of Carthusian monks in the 15th century, and I was both a little inspired by their lifestyle and a little critical. They built their lives almost exclusively around prayer, reading, contemplation, meditation and reflection. For hours in …

I want to begin this post by recounting a conversation that, as I’ve looked back on the weeks and months since the COVID-19 pandemic brought schools, universities, and economies to a halt, I’m sure I had hundreds of times. Whether talking to family members, friends, roommates, peers, professors, or acquaintances, riffs on the following phrases …

When I was first learning French in high school, I was enthralled by Paris. Not only did I love the language, but the cuisine, the culture, the history, and of course the art seemed as though they were all part of this mystical world I wanted to get to know—and that Paris embodied. But it …

As a specialist in the literature of Britain’s Romantic period, I had little occasion during graduate school or the first twelve years of my professorial career to venture outside the Anglophone world in my teaching and research. This suddenly changed, though, in 2012, when I began a five-year stint running BYU’s European Studies program. Besides …