Promoting collaborative research on ideas
central to the pressing issues of our time.
Talk by Amy J. Elias, 2026 Humanities Institute Outstanding Alumni Award Winner
Wednesday, November 18
4:00 p.m.
158 Willard Building
In 2022, Psychology Today reported that there were 225 million Google hits for the term “authentic self.” In our current moment of deep fakes and retouched histories, the problem of what is authentic has been exacerbated, posing a challenge to the arts and humanities: how to investigate “the authentic” as a value of place, identity, history, and cognition without falling prey to nostalgia, anthropocentrism, or politicized grounding. This talk presents an example of how a research group is uniquely answering that challenge through interdisciplinary inquiry and cohort building in a time of fracture–and illustrating how humanities centers may be uniquely able to address such large questions in institutional contexts.
Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is also Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts. Elias is the author or editor of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP), awarded the Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative; The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern UP); Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press); and most recently Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke UP), named by Hyperallergic as one of the top 25 books published in Art History in 2025. She was principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of its scholarly journal ASAP/Journal. She is currently working on a book about coal and dementia.
Tuesday, October 27, Noon-1:00 p.m.
124 Sparks Building
Lunch will be provided.
Tuesday, November 3, Noon-1:00 p.m.
124 Sparks Building
Lunch will be provided.
Tuesday, November 17
Noon – 1:00 p.m.
124 Sparks Building
Lunch will be provided
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 2026-2027 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. 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.