Humanities Archives - Public Seminar

Education

The Humanities As a Theory of Change

The career of Ruth Simmons is a lesson in humanities methodology

November 14, 2023 • by Antoinette Burton

At a moment when state auditors are scrutinizing higher education budgets with an eye to trimming humanities majors and offerings out of existence, we’d do well to pause and reflect on the career of the distinguished educator Ruth Simmons....

Film & Performing Arts

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

The new film from George Miller doesn’t do humanities scholars any favors

October 5, 2022 • by Hannah H. Kim

The problem of Three Thousand Years of Longing isn’t just that Alithea, our unfortunate representative, is unimaginative; the plot suggests the humanities have no natural home in the twenty-first century....

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

Feature

Eco’s How to Write a Thesis

A love letter to the humanities

October 22, 2018 • by Holly Genovese

I first picked up Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis at the campus Barnes and Noble while writing my own. It didn’t seem particularly instructive, but I skimmed the book, already too far into the process to use Eco’s meticulous suggestions about organizing readings and archives with notecards. But his belief ...

Education

Reviving Humanities Education

A counterintuitive suggestion

May 23, 2018 • by Andrew Hartman

A 2017 Pew Research Center poll reveals a majority of Republicans believe American universities have a negative impact on the country. It seems the nation’s system of higher education is falling prey to growing political polarization. Just as Republicans have increasingly come to distrust other seemingly liberal institutions, such as the ...