Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
The following post was written by Matthew Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center. I recently returned from two events related to humanities centers and institutes. The first was the annual conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, a gathering that convenes some two hundred scholars from around the world. Attendees range from …
On February 24, 2015, Jim Leach, the ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, visited Brigham Young University’s campus to give a forum address. As an NEH chairman, Leach advocated the importance of the humanities in a nation shifting its focus to the STEM field, offering an important defense of the humanities as …
The following post was written by Mark Davies, a professor of Linguistics and English Language and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Corpora (large collections of highly-searchable texts) are obviously useful for linguistic analysis. But as I’ll try to show in this short blog post, they are also potentially very useful for research on …
Brian Russell Roberts is a Humanities Center Faculty Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Central Java, Indonesia. With Keith Foulcher (Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney), he has written Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference, forthcoming from Duke University Press, Spring 2016. …
The following post was written by Laura Catharine Smith, a professor of German and Slavic Languages and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Each year, faculty in the humanities face the same question from students: Why should I get a degree in the German/French/Philosophy/Classics, etc.? The question is generally followed up with a remark stating …
The Humanities Center’s Public Humanities page is an attempt to document the vast public efforts made by BYU faculty in the Humanities College. Included in the page is an impressive list of affiliated faculty–that is, faculty with some kind of public humanities presence over the past five years. Some of this work has been enabled by …
In spring of 2011, Dr. Emron Esplin (BYU) and Dr. Margarida Vale de Gato (University of Lisbon) met at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting and decided to co-edit a book that would take the next step in transnational Poe studies by focusing specifically on Poe translations in as many literary traditions as possible. …
The following post was written by Andy Nelson, one of the Humanities Center’s Snow Fellows. As graduation approaches—just over one month away—I have had several questions on my mind. Have I made the most of my four years as an undergraduate? Do I really want to spend two more years doing graduate work? Will my …
The following post was written by Blair Bateman, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Earlier this semester I had the opportunity to attend a Humanities Center Conversation on capacity of literature to develop empathy for others. In preparation for the meeting, participants were invited to read a …
Among his many teaching goals when he arrived at BYU in 2004, Professor Patrick Madden wanted to expose creative writing students to far more classical essays than they were used to (often they were used to zero), and he wanted to avoid costly, unwieldy coursepacks. His solution was an online anthology of public-domain essays (originally published before 1923) …
