Promoting collaborative research on ideas central to the pressing issues of our time.
Humanities Institute Annual Event
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.
Reading New Books: Phileto's Story by Lodovico Corfino
HumIn Focus: Episode 9 is now Live!
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.
Humanities Works
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/.