Promoting collaborative research on ideas
central to the pressing issues of our time.
Episode 8 of HumIn Focus, “To Be Indigenous: Learning with Native Peoples” premiered on WPSU on February 22nd, 2024, at 9:00 p.m. 📰 Click here to read the release announcement in the news.
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.
As part of a university initiative to create synergies across the Penn State University system, faculty at the Harrisburg and Greater Allegheny Penn State campuses, have produced a video series promoting the value of Humanities education, called “Humanities Works”. The series is produced by Rosemary Martinelli and Catherine Rios.
Visit Commonwealth Campuses Collaboration Programs to view the recordings from this series.
The Humanities in the World initiative includes funding for Visiting Scholars, Postdoctoral Scholars, and our Faculty Invites program.
Learn more about the Initiative
Find out more about Programming Resources for Commonwealth Campuses
Message from Director John Christman
Dear Humanities Institute Community,
We hope your year is going well. We are in the midst of an exciting year of events, visitors, programs and initiatives at the Institute and from the people and units we support.
We are re-doubling our commitment to the core themes in our Institute mission, including support for collaborative work in humanities fields, to foment and support work in these fields that contributes to social justice efforts, and to generally stress the broad social value of humanities and its related areas of scholarship.
We continue with our Public Humanities Fellowship program with another full class of Fellows in the Introduction to Public Humanities course last fall and Capstone class this spring. We are excited to see what these great creative scholars will produce in their effort to create socially productive dialogue about currently pressing issues.
Thanks to the Humanities in the World Initiative, we are again able to host a full cohort of Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Scholars at Ihlseng Cottage. We have been introducing these scholars to the wider community and will continue to do so. Two postdocs in this group are connected to the Mellon-funded Just Transformations Initiative, a multi-faceted project geared toward building and sustaining diverse communities in higher education. These scholars will join our line-up of Penn State faculty and graduate students who have been awarded our Resident Fellowships for this academic year.
Our Emmy-nominated documentary series, HumIn Focus, continues its production in cooperation with WPSU and the Bellisario College of Communication. Co-executive producer Matt Jordan and I are excited about our new episodes this coming year. Our latest, which was broadcast on February 22, was “To Be Indigenous: Learning with Native Peoples”. The episode can be accessed here:
In addition, we are hosting a number of events that have been proposed by our faculty through our Faculty Invites process. Stay tuned for announcements of these exciting lectures, workshops and conferences.
We look forward to a great year for the humanities community and beyond!
John C.
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.