Education for Leadership
This group is interested in elevating the quality of education for all grade levels, elementary through post-secondary, and tying language arts education to leadership development as the most promising way to accomplish this goal.
Experiential Learning
The general focus will be exploring the impact/value of the humanities in the wider world. Specifically, what is unique about a humanities education that equips people to contribute in civic and professional life? We will examine literature and studies that address the ways humanities competencies are valued outside academia. We will also address the role of experiential education in preparing students to translate their humanities training outside the classroom.
Humanities Lab
This lab is focused on the impact of the humanities. This will very much be a collaborative project. It will venture to the frontier of several disciplines, involve faculty and students from other parts of campus, and demand both new technologies and plenty of critical ingenuity.
Humanities Plus Haiti Health Initiative
This group’s project aims to improve HHI’s service and research in Haiti through a postcolonial analysis of their past and current efforts. By extension, other cross-cultural philanthropic and academic activities will benefit from this constructive critique, and a bit more attention will be shown to the neglected nation of Haiti.
Jazz, Blues and Beyond
This group is comprised of scholars involved in the ever-growing body of research on the music of the African diaspora (jazz, rock and roll, the blues, reggae, cumbia, salsa, bossa nova, samba, tango, hip hop, etc.), as well as literature, improvisation, art, dance, film, politics, history, and spirituality as they relate to black music.
Psychoanalysis Reading Group
Psychoanalysis continues to be relevant to the humanities as a tool for thinking about issues of trauma, memory and testimony. The purpose of the Psychoanalysis Reading Group is to revisit key psychoanalytic texts and to discover new insights into the ways psychoanalysis still speaks to questions of what it means to be human. The group is also interested in developing a stronger foundation of understanding so that we can eventually move toward other theories that build on work by Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva.