Humanities News
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BYU has so many wonderful alumni and emeriti who have served the community; it would be impossible to recognize everyone. But from time to time, we recognize a few individuals who have lived particularly exemplary lives of service, mentorship, and impact. Dave Wolverton (Farland) was such an individual—not just to the Latter-day Saint writing community but to any aspiring writer—and is worthy of mentioning as an example to us all.
Authors learned how to bring their fiction and nonfiction writing to life at the Latter-day Saint Publishing and Media Association 2021 Conference.
Bonnie L. Oscarson gave the 2021 Honored Alumni Lecture for the BYU College of Humanities.
Explore new directors, cultures, and themes this semester with International Cinema.
Walking through the tunnel from the airplane to the airport, I read the words printed on the wall: “Welcome to Israel. Your life will never be the same.”
Would you find Galileo guilty of heresy? Would you put him to death? These are questions that students grappled with in their two-week mock trial for Philosophy 210 class.
As a second-generation American from a blue-collar family, whose parents never graduated high school, I found college to be emancipating. Thus I became a teacher to share the far-reaching world the arts and humanities offer. Our society, our country, might be better if we in the humanities would “shout, and . . . draw large and startling figures”1 as Flannery O’Connor said in her defense of the Christian vision. During a recent symposium in Rome to promote novelist Willa Cather in Europe, I was dismayed to find that the conference yielded little evidence of the author’s significance and was more or less limited to esoteric presentations by scholars devoted to their pet interests. There was little awareness of the need to shout, to describe Cather’s bold European immigrants, colonists, and missionaries.
Philosophy and the field of medicine have complementary roles in helping us ask difficult questions and propose workable solutions to today’s pressing concerns.
A lot changes in a department over time, and that has certainly been true in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at BYU. Today, the department includes comparative literature, classics, interdisciplinary humanities, art history, Scandinavian studies, and a master’s degree in comparative studies. To give you a sense of how the department has changed and its vision for the future, I interviewed Kerry Soper and Carl Sederholm, the incoming and outgoing chairs of the department, along with Julie Allen, the department graduate studies coordinator. Their responses are both intriguing and enlightening.
As women have increasingly contributed their time, talents, and mentorship to the humanities, the field has evolved to reflect the unique contributions women make. In the following stories, eight faculty members (one from each department in the College of Humanities) share their admiration for women who have helped redefine the humanities—and what it means to be human.
