Promoting collaborative research on ideas central to the pressing issues of our time.

C. Libby, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Tuesday, April 1, Noon-1:00pm. 124 Sparks Building

Lunch will be provided.

This talk places the theological practice of unknowing (apophasis) in conversation with contemporary writing on the abyss. Turning to medieval French mystic Marguerite Porete’s visionary writing, I theorize an understanding of embodiment that exceeds the biopolitical logics of gender.

Shirley Moody-Turner, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies

Tuesday, April 8, Noon-1:00pm. 124 Sparks Building

Lunch will be provided.

In this talk, Shirley Moody-Turner discusses her biography-in-progress on Anna Julia Cooper, trailblazing Black educator, intellectual, and activist, who fought to maintain and expand Black access to higher education.  She explores what was at stake in the battle over Black higher education at the turn into the twentieth century and shows how the national ascendency of Jim Crow segregation played out in the local politics affecting the lives of Black Washingtonians. Her talk charts how this struggle propelled Cooper’s own journey to become one of the first Black women to earn a PhD, while also documenting the collective strategies she and her contemporaries enacted to respond to the assault on Black higher education.

Our Spring graduate scholars, Daniela Farkas and Tashi Namgyal will be presenting their work on Tuesday, February 11 from Noon to 1:00 p.m, in 124 Sparks Building. Read more about their projects by clicking on their photos below:

The Graduate Scholars in Residence program provides students in the humanities with a one-course teaching release or summer funding, enabling them to devote an entire semester to work on their dissertations.

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.

Talk: “A Kind of Resistance: Illustrating Holocaust Survivor Stories”

Tuesday, February 25th at 2:00 pm. Dewey Room, W-043 Paterno Library*

In this session, Libicki will show a detailed deconstruction of the process of building a graphic novel out of interviews and active collaboration with survivors, historians and researchers. She will discuss the unique strengths, as well as challenges, of using comics to depict the Holocaust, and to depict subjective memory in the absence of photographic documentation. A short observational drawing exercise during the lecture will allow participants to experience drawing as an act of memory, of observation, of communication and creation.

Workshop: “Inking the Unthinkable: A sense-memory writing and cartooning workshop”

Wednesday, February 26th at 2:00 pm. 133 Sparks Building

A hands-on memoir comix workshop inspired by educator/cartoonist Lynda Barry’s theories of creative concentration as “deep play,” and writing as “delivering an image.” No drawing experience is needed– we all have more drawing experience than we admit. As Barry says, “People tell me I can’t draw and I say, so what have I been doing for 30 years?”

“The Last Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson in the American Century”

February 25th at 3:30 pm Foster Auditorium, 124 Sparks Building

As a student and, eventually, professor, Norman Holmes Pearson changed the story of American literature, putting modernist poetry (especially by women) at its center. He was one of the founders of the discipline of American studies, and helped forge the alliance between universities, foundations and professional societies, and the national-security state in the 1950s and 1960s. And he was a spy. During World War II he created and headed X-2, the OSS’s counterintelligence branch, and helped design (and recruit for) the Central Intelligence Agency. In this talk, Greg Barnhisel will give an overview of Pearson’s unique career as a literary fixer, secret agent, cultural diplomat, academic bureaucrat, and one of the architects of the American Century.

This keynote event is co-sponsored by the Department of English

Summer Graduate Scholars in Residence: February 6, 2025.

Faculty Invites & Conference Funding:  February 10, 2025.

Public Humanities Fellowship: February 10, 2025.

Fall Graduate Scholars in Residence:  March 17, 2025.

Collaborative Colloquia: March 24, 2025.

Monday, March 31 at 4:00 pm
110 Robb Hall, Hintz Family Alumni Center
Reception to follow.

The Humanities Institute will host our annual “Celebrate the Humanities” Lecture and Outstanding Alumni Award event on March 31 at 4:00 in the Hintz Family Alumni Center on the University Park campus.

Our invited lecturer, Dr. Sara Guyer, Irving and Jean Stone Dean of the Division of Arts & Humanities and Professor in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, is well-known for her initiatives in furthering positive narratives regarding the value of the work of the humanities. 

We will also present our Outstanding Alumni Award to Dr. Rónké Òké, 2015 PhD Philosophy.

In this current moment, it is especially important to demonstrate our support of the humanities at Penn State and to be a part of a crucial conversation regarding how to respond to the ongoing challenges we face in the humanities and in higher education more generally. 

We hope to see you there!

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/.