Promoting collaborative research on ideas
central to the pressing issues of our time.
Friday, March 27 3:00 pm
110 Robb Hall, Hintz Family Alumni Center With Reception to Follow
“Cultural Deliteracy: The Project of Offloading The Humanities”
E.D. Hirsch’s popular education jeremiad, Cultural Literacy (1987), was published in the midst of a financial crisis which was both precipitated by the growth of private equity funds and facilitated their further concentration. This address uses the cultural literacy and the junk bond as a starting point for theorizing how and why humanities education has been continuously defunded and decentered in U.S. higher education while simultaneously being propagandistically treated as having sirenic control of student political actions.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, and host of The American Vandal Podcast. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion To Literature & Economics (2018) and has published extensively in Mark Twain studies, the political economy of mass media, and critical university studies. He is also currently working on a book triangulating the rise of private equity, education technology, and neoliberal university administration, tentatively titled Deliberate Deliteracy.
Episode 9 of HumIn Focus, “Teaching Humanity: The Social Value of Higher Education” premiered on WPSU on October 24th, 2024, at 9:00 p.m. 📰 Click here to read more about this episode.
HumIn Focus is a multi-part web series centering on pressing social issues through the lens of the work of humanities scholars. To learn more about the web series, visit the HumIn Focus website.
In partnership with our humanities colleagues in the Commonwealth Campuses, an initiative demonstrating the value of humanities education is ongoing. Humanities Works tells the stories of people who use the skills and knowledge of the humanities to face real-world challenges and to make better solutions. Read more at https://www.humanitiesworks.psu.edu/.
Welcome to 2025-2026 at the Humanities Institute!
A Note from our Director, John Christman:
This will be another exciting year for the Institute. We look forward to continuing our support of humanities faculty and students, both in their research and teaching. Our Faculty and Graduate Student Resident Fellows will be sharing their work throughout the year (see our listserv for dates), and we will be supporting a number of other events throughout the fall and spring. We are also pleased to announce that the Center for Humanities and Information, ably led by Eric Hayot since 2015, will be joining our fold. We plan to spearhead this transition in ways that will make the CHI even more relevant and cutting edge in its programing and support opportunities. Stay informed by joining our listserv, following us on social media, or checking back here.
Acknowledgement of Land
The Pennsylvania State University campuses are located on the original homelands of the Erie, Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora), Lenape (Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe, Stockbridge-Munsee), Shawnee (Absentee, Eastern, and Oklahoma), Susquehannock, and Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nations. As a land grant institution, we acknowledge and honor the traditional caretakers of these lands and strive to understand and model their responsible stewardship. We also acknowledge the longer history of these lands and our place in that history.