The Translation Studies Research Group will present at our weekly Colloquium on October 8th @ 3:00 in JFSB 4010. The group will present on the state of the Translation Studies field as well as current research. Catering by Banana Leaf.
Why Computers Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Replace Human Communication
The threat of robots overtaking the workforce and making humans superfluous would seem ludicrous decades ago. Now, while still seemingly a stretch, it doesn’t quite hold the same level of outlandishness as before. For example, J.P. Wright discussed his shifting job as a locomotive engineer. He states that the work that was once done by …
Review: How to Build a Life in the Humanities
This post was written by Bert Fuller, who is graduating from BYU’s Comparative Studies MA program and beginning his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto this fall. Last March Daryl Lee of the French Department at Brigham Young University caught me reading Greg Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an …
Prophetic Poetry
When asked, “What is your view of the function of poetry in today’s society?”, poet Mark Strand replied, “It’s not going to change the world, but I believe if every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we’d live in a much more humane and decent world. Poetry …
The Crisis of No “Crisis”
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 …
Civility and the Humanities
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 Importance of Collocates
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 …
Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Bandung Conference
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. …
Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century
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 …
Public Humanities
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 …