Graduate Student Residents 2021 · Humanities Moments

The Unexpected Grief of Breath of the Wild

Video games are kind of known for having pretty bland or shallow main characters. From the perspective of the video game developer it makes sense: you want to allow your audience to easily ‘slide into’ the character they control with as little…

Artificial Intelligence Technology in Hispanic Digital Literature

It was an exciting discovery when I read Condiciones Extremas by Juan B. Gutiérrez. Beyond the outstanding quality of the content, this digital novel also impressed me with its use of innovative technology. New technology has always amazed me. In…

El yawar punchau verdadero: The time I discovered Jose Maria Arguedas

I hadn’t noticed until now how little I remember about the time I first read Yawar Fiesta. I know I had already received my bachelor’s degree and was working as an engineer. Was it 12, 15 years ago? I don’t know the exact time, nor the reason I…

A Touch of Green

While doing research in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu province in China, I made a visit to a local neighborhood called Dafang Lane. There's no famous tourist spot here, but I was drawn to it by a Taiwanese TV series that I watched years ago --…

A Play and New Perspectives

In the summer of 2018, I took a trip to England where I had the opportunity to truly explore the city of London for the first time. One night during my stay, I visited the National Theatre where I saw the play Translations by Brian Friel. Set in a…

J.C. Bach and the Exhaustion of Feeling

I was around 16 years old at the time of my humanities moment. I had been playing the viola for 7 years. As usually occurred, I became bored with practicing the first movement of J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C minor that my teacher had given me for…

Rise of Civilization

I’ve always been close with the humanities-- my mother is an English teacher-- and history and literature have always appealed to me. When I look back, though, I can point to a single time that determined my future in the humanities. That would be…

Still I Rise

I have so many fond childhood memories of the Black church in which I grew up. My mother was a founding member of the church, and she was responsible for producing the annual Black History Program every February; this program showcased youth and…

Have One on Joanna Newsom

As I considered a range of options for my Humanities Moment, I instinctively knew it would come down to music, which is the element that moves me most often and intensely in my daily life. However, my tendency to live within particular soundscapes…

A Painting, A Baby, and Jacques Lacan Walk into a Syllabus...

This summer, I am working with the Syracuse University Art Museum to create English-specific teaching resources. The goal is to make the museum's collections more accessible to instructors for both teaching and research purposes. The job came with…

A Sword From Italy by Way of Alexandria

It was not my first time in The City, but it was my first time visiting the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's reputation stretched out wide before it for a young man from the West Coast. I had long been interested in art, and I knew that the Met…

Capacious Language in Romeo and Juliet

Despite its cultural prominence and my specialization in early modern English drama, I have not worked closely with Romeo and Juliet. I did read it once, but that was when I was a freshman in high school. And by “read” it, I mean that I relied on the…

"on a small radiant screen honeydew melon green are my scintillating bones"

Gwen Harwood's "Bone Scan" will always have a place in my heart when it comes to my inspiration for teaching Literature and my abiding interest in the humanities. Growing up in Singapore, the educational environment I was in did not prioritize…

Feminist Killjoys

In my 'Problems and Issues in Feminist Theory' graduate course in the Women's and Gender Studies Department, my professor assigned a new release in feminist and queer theory called Living a Feminist Life by independent scholar Sara Ahmed. Reading the…

The Original Starry Night

"Starlight Over the Rhone" is a precursor to the much more famous "Starry, Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh. It features a boundless black sky that merges into the murky waters of the Rhone below. Stars shine brightly above and are reflected in the…

A History of Redevelopments

My humanities moment comes in the form a song called "Inner City Blues," by Marvin Gaye. The song was released in 1971 and it was a vocal illustration of the widening gap of inequality, racial instability, and social hardship endured by Black…

Finding My Long-Lost Grandmother

In 2013, as a new college student, I started exploring genealogy. I learned to use the research skills that I developed from college history class to explore primary sources documents on my own. I reached out to extended family members, made new…

From The Page to The Garden to The Fridge

For the first two decades of my life, food wasn't something to which something I gave much serious consideration. I was guided—as I suspect most young adults are—by taste, convenience, and price. I knew what I liked, where I could get it, and that I…

Reflecting on Reality Through Fiction

One of my most memorable humanities moments came during a period of my life where I was not enrolled in any academic institution, but instead working full-time in a secretarial position in the private sector. It was during this time, shortly after…

If These Trees Could Talk

A cold morning in February and a sun still shy to rise, it's time to harvest olives! As all the baggage is ready from the day before, there are only mud drooling roads to worry about (once the sun makes up his mind). Soon water runs down my back too,…

Philosophers Are Interested in A.I., But Why Would A.I. Be Interested in Philosophy?

The final scenes of Her afford a surprising opportunity for thinking about the value of philosophy. Theodore Twombly, the central human character, has just been dumped by their romantic partner, a relatively new and cutting-edge A.I. software…

St Cuthbert: Just One Voice in a Silent Crowd

In the summer of 2017 I was visiting my family in the northeast of the UK as I prepared to begin my Ph.D. in the United States. I had been out of academia for a few years and was eager to get back to working on my passion - the literature of early…

Sounds of a Thing in Indiana

The following text is a transcript of the above recording.

My name is Daun Fields, I’m a punk singer and a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida. I’m 42 and this is my Humanities Moment.

So, my humanities object is the Fisher Price tape…

"The Machine Stops" is Only a Start

I was always a voracious reader with a preference for fiction. My family made regular trips to the library growing up, so I had a never-ending supply of books at hand. Yet, one story I read in my high school British Literature class stands out as…

Random Research Gems

I’m deep in research for an article, searching through the National Library of Wales’s digital archives of the South Wales Echo newspaper for coverage of a specific coal mine explosion. Yes, there is a search function, but it turns out that computers…

An Afternoon at the MoMA

In the summer of 2009, in the final year of my undergraduate studies, I spent a month in New York with my sister. The MoMA was always going to be a site of pilgrimage. Throughout my sister’s studies at the art academy, she would come back home for…

Human Grace

In 2009, when I was a freshman in college, I went to France and Germany at the end of a year-long seminar exploring the emergence of European nationalism after 1848. As I majored in History and Art History & Archaeology, this class was right up…

Humanities Moment(s)

During my hours of online teaching this year, I have repeatedly tried to bring myself back to my first encounters with the Humanities classroom. As an enthusiastic first-year student in comparative literature, I was excited to learn about art and…

Homegrown

My wanderlust took me to many places around the world where I experienced humanities moments at nearly every turn, but my hometown is where my relationship with the humanities was born.

My childhood in a small town in New Hampshire was steeped in…

The Power of Performance

One night during my first semester of undergrad, I flipped on PBS on my tiny dorm room TV to watch Richard II. Or, half-watch, I should say – I was still convinced that I could multitask, so I was also reading one of my history textbooks. As I nursed…