The Humanities Institute at Penn State University

Dear Friends of the Humanities Institute,

Welcome to the new academic year.

I want to begin by sending out a heartfelt public thank-you to Tina Chen for serving as the Interim Director of the HI this past year. She and our wonderful team not only kept the ship aright but plowed on full speed ahead, all the while juggling the myriad challenges posed by COVID. Thank you Tina!

As I step back in to the Directorship I hope to pick up on the ongoing energy and momentum of our various projects and initiatives but also to reiterate the unifying themes that drive our efforts and orient our mission. These include an emphasis on cooperative scholarship and interdisciplinary work in the humanities, and to accentuate the public value of work in the humanities, especially concerning struggles for social justice and the greater social good.

In this vein, we are continuing with the Public Humanities Initiative in its various forms. Principle among them is the Public Humanities Fellows Program, overseen by our Associate Director Lauren Kooistra. The Program has drawn another full class to the “Introduction to Public Humanities” course this fall. As part of that initiative, we welcome Elizabeth Grey in her new role as coordinator of the Fellows Program and co-instructor of the Intro course and companion Capstone course in the Spring. The other instructor for these courses is Ashley Seering, who is newly arriving to Penn State and will be teaching also in the Bellisario College of Communications.

Thanks to the Humanities in the World Initiative, we are again able to host a full cohort of Visiting Scholars and Post-doctoral fellows at Ihlseng Cottage. We hope to introduce these scholars to the wider community soon. Two Visiting Scholars and two post-docs 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.

We are also happy to announce, in cooperation with the Center for Global Studies at Penn State, a new program of Global Humanities Research Impact Grants to support Penn State scholars pursuing advanced global humanities research with a grant of up to $5,000 for international research travel.

We continue our production of the documentary series, HumIn Focus , also in partnership with the Bellisario College of Com. Co-executive producer Matt Jordan and I are excited about this ongoing work, which will include a new episode we are just completing, to be aired later this fall. The topic of the (yet to be titled) piece is stories of communities that confront social and cultural difference and attempt, and sometimes fail, to create complex, creolized identities against the backdrop of increased global tribalization. All episodes can be found at https://hi.psu.edu.

We encourage people to use these films in their classrooms and other venues to facilitate discussion of the important issues they confront.

In addition, we will host 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.

Finally, guided by the central principles of our mission, we rededicate ourselves to promoting these and related themes as we work to support the amazing work that our humanities colleagues, students, and friends engage in.