All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. January 22 Tony Brown (German and Russian), Jennifer Bown (German and Russian), and Bill Eggington (Linguistics and English Language) “Developing Global Proficiency through Debate.” January 29 David Laraway (Spanish and Portuguese) “American Idiots: Outsider Music and the Philosophy of Incompetence” …
Answers and Questions: Yet Another New Year’s Resolution Blog Post
The following post was written by Beau Hilton, one of the Humanities Center’s Snow Fellows. Please forgive the cliché. New Year’s blog posts are worn out and profligate, and this one even commits the crime of tardiness. However I try to remain aloof from the notions and gyrations of New Year reflections and resolutions, I …
“I Can’t Breathe”: Attempting Conversation with Imperfect Language
While the BYU Humanities Center, as its mission statement declares, features the language, literature, thought, culture, and history of the human conversation, the overarching idea of conversation places language at the center of that mission. The commitment to language is evident in many Center activities, not least of which is the formation of a new …
Secularism and the Humanities
Matthew Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center Recently, and coincidentally, I read two articles on the same day that seemed to speak to, and yet past, each other. One was in The Salt Lake Tribune and bore the ominous title “BYU Prof Fears Mormon Scholars Are Giving In to Secularism,” while the other, published in …
Hans-Wilhelm Kelling’s Research: From Female SS Guards to George Bancroft
Throughout his career at BYU and continuing today, Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Kelling has remained an example of lifelong learning to his students. His paper entitled “Female Guards, Nurses, and Doctors in German Concentration Camps” was recently awarded the Best Paper Award by the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in the Humanities/Philosophy/Foreign Language Division. In …
2014
Megan Armknecht Megan presented on how Louisa May Alcott was influenced by German Romanticism–specifically the German thinker and writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She had noticed resonances between Goethe’s thinking and personality in the character of Dr. Bhaer in Alcott’s classic, Little Women, and wanted to find out if these connections meant anything and if …
Psychological and Financial Benefits of “Slowing Down”
We can obtain a lot of information instantly. We can check email, find the weather forecast, take a photo, make a purchase, all in a matter of seconds. The rapidity of modern–or digital–life is convenient; it makes us more efficient and frees up time to accomplish other things. It’s hard to believe that there might …
Celebrate National Arts and Humanities Month
On September 30, President Obama declared October 2014, National Arts and Humanities Month. This is the 29th year in a row that October has been dedicated to celebrating Arts and Humanities. In his proclamation, Obama wrote, “Since our earliest days, America has flourished because of the creative spirit and vision of our people. Our Nation …
Brian Roberts’s study of American literature leads him to Indonesia.
Over the past several years, Professor Roberts has collaborated with Dr. Keith Foulcher (Indonesian Studies, University of Sydney) to research American writer Richard Wright’s 1955 travel to Indonesia to attend the Asian-African Conference, a landmark meeting of representatives from twenty-nine postcolonial Asian and African countries. In May 2013, with funding from the Kennedy Center for …
75 Years After His Death, Has Freud Slipped Out of Our Conscious?
If you ask a psychologist, they will tell you Freud is obsolete. His theories have been debunked. The Oedipus Complex? Nonsense. Psychotherapy? Not helpful. But this week, Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, says otherwise in a piece he wrote for the The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “Why Freud Still Haunts Us.” Rather …