In a powerful scene in James MacPherson’s Ossian poems, the king mourns the loss of his son in battle: “My eyes are blind with tears; but memory beams on my heart. How can I relate the mournful death of the head of the people! Prince of the warriors, Oscur, my son, shall I see thee …
Colloquium: Brian Price
Brian Price will present Mexico in the Key of Rock: Thoughts on Music, Literature, and Film at our weekly Colloquium on October 15th @ 3:00 in JFSB 4010. Catering by El Gallo Giro Mexican Grill.
The Moral Imagination, Crises of Conscience, and the End(s) of Literature
As the humanities and, more narrowly, literary studies suffer through something of a present-day identity crisis—as the number of majors dwindle, and as literary scholars migrate into media studies, the environmental humanities, and other fields—literary traditionalists seem increasingly given to creative defenses of the value of their work. This has been brought to mind recently …
Urban Narratives and the Provo City Planning Commission
In 2013, Dr. Jamin Rowan of the BYU English Department attended a neighborhood meeting to discuss the proposed routes for the new Bus Rapid Transit line that will soon connect the Provo and Orem Frontrunner stations. Although he had never imagined that he would be involved in city politics, participating in this meeting helped him …
The Relevance of the Humanities in a Digital World
The following post was written by Tamara Pace Thomson, a student Fellow at the Center. Recently, in the Stanford Magazine for alumni, I read an interview with Professor Alexander Nemerov, who was a professor of art history at Stanford from 1992–2001 before teaching at Yale for eleven years. He returned to Stanford in 2013 and …
American Food Trucks in the World: Street Food and Food, the Public Humanities and the Humanities
The following post was written by Brian Russell Roberts, a Faculty Fellow at the Center. 14 September 2015 In April 2014, one of the BYU Humanities Center’s research groups hosted Yale English professor Wai Chee Dimock. During Professor Dimock’s visit to campus, she graciously sat down for an interview with our Humanities Center Director, Matt …
Fall 2015
All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. November 19 Mark Davies (Linguistics) October 30 Mari Yoshihara (American Studies; University of Hawaii, Manoa October 15 Brian Price (Spanish & Portuguese) Mexico in the Key of Rock: Thoughts on Music, Literature, and Film October 8 Translation Studies Group October 1 Dee Gardner …
Battling Gender Bias
Edith Sand and Victor Lavy of Tel Aviv University conducted a study about unconscious gender bias in teachers grading elementary students. They concluded that teachers, who obviously know the gender of their students, give lower grades to girls and higher grades to boys than outside graders who do not know the gender of those they …
On Scholarship, Faith, and the Challenge of Scale
This fall semester, the BYU Humanities Center begins its fourth year. I accepted the position of Founding Director of the Center in June of 2012, and prior to the Center’s official launch I decided to familiarize myself with a range of new work across the humanities. More important, I felt I needed to learn about …
Environmental Humanities Symposium
This post was written by BYU Professor George Handley, who helped organize the symposium. Thanks to the support of the Humanities Center, the newly formed Environmental Humanities research group is co-sponsoring with the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities program a symposium on September 24-27 on “The Future of the Environmental Humanities: Art, Thought, and Action in the Anthropocene.” This …












