Events by Category

The Humanities Center in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts was founded in 1999. Its mission was to stimulate the life of the mind both among the faculty of the College and in the university and community at large, by creating and nurturing an interdisciplinary intellectual culture of ideas. Towards that end it chooses each year a theme to explore and invites prominent outside scholars to speak on topics related to this theme. The Center has been successful in bringing eight Presidential Scholars to campus, including philosophers Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, historians Anthony Grafton, Edward J. Larson, and James McPherson, novelist Richard Powers, architect and writer Witold Rybczynski, and aesthetician Elaine Scarry. It has also brought to campus for talks and seminars dozens of other well known literary critics, writers, poets, historians, and philosophers, most recently, for example, literary critic/poet Sandra Gilbert and science writer Rebecca Skloot. In addition the Humanities Center sponsors a Friday Symposia series for faculty members to present their research, as well as a Thursday Tertulia series for more informal talks, debates, and panel discussions.