All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. May 18 Marie Orton (French & Italian) “Migration Literature and the Politics of Changing National Identity”
The 2017 Conference of the Modern Language Association: Notes from Underground
This post was written by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director of the BYU Humanities Center I’ve attended the conference of the Modern Language Association most years since I arrived at BYU in 2000. I thought I might take off this year’s conference (held in Philadelphia), but then decided late in the game to attend, after all. …
2017: Here’s to those who dream!
This post was written by Benjamin Jacob, HC Student Fellow, Interdisciplinary Studies major One of the most poignant moments in the wonderful new film “La La Land” occurs as the aspiring actress Mia (played by Emma Stone) auditions for a part in a movie. She auditions by singing the story of her aunt, an eccentric …
Karama and the Call for Interfaith Peace and Coexistence
The following post was written by Brittany Bruner, a former Humanities Center intern. I spent a semester in Jordan during a fraught moment in history. The Syrian refugee crisis is rampant all over the world. It is especially troubling in the Middle East, and in Jordan, a country that houses over one million Syrian refugees, …
Finding a Place for Lady Liberty: Thoughts on Sukorov, Napoleon, and Morrison
Next week, I’m introducing Alexander Sukorov’s Francofonia, a history about the Louvre under Nazi occupation and a philosophical inquiry into art and historical consciousness, at BYU’s International Cinema. In this genre-defying film, the figure of Marianne, the French iteration of Lady Liberty who emerged during the Revolution, is occasionally shown flitting about the empty and …
Fall 2016
Matthew Mutter, Bard College Title: “‘What is Joy?’: Yeats, Paganism, and the Passions” November 3, 2016 W.B. Yeats claimed that the governing tension of his poetic imagination could be characterized as a competition between the “swordsman” and the “saint.” His writing figures this tension in multiple ways—Oedipus v. Christ, Homer v. von Hügel, Michael Angelo …
Teaching Creativity: Understanding Vulnerability
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” –Brené Brown, TED Talk “Listening to shame” March 2012 In a TED talk I watched recently, Brené Brown talks about life being a compilation of individuals seeking connection. The whole point of life, she says, is to make meaningful connections with people, and we strive to …
Frankenstein for the Future: Questions on Creation and AI
This post was written by Carlee Schmidt, HC Undergraduate Fellow I didn’t know the Creature had a voice. I also grew up thinking the towering green figure was named Frankenstein, when actually that’s the name of the doctor who created it. My visual memory is encapsulated in a large plate my mom used during Halloween …
“On Faith and Imagination and the Mind of Winter, Thawing”
In his 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” Martin Heidegger laid out a series of propositions regarding scientific attitudes, and specifically how the sciences assess their objects of study. “What should be examined are beings only, and besides that—nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings, and beyond that—nothing.” Science, that is, should take up only those …
Winter 2017
All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. January 19 Dana Bourgerie (Asian & Near Eastern Languages) “Remembering Cambodia” January 26 Norman Wirzba (Duke University) “Agrarian Environmentalism?” February 16 Laura Zientek (Comparative Arts & Letters) “Questioning Lucan’s Nature: An examination of landscape in the Civil War” February 23 Paul Westover …