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"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 could get it for cheap. My lack of interest in what I ate directly paralleled my ignorance and detachment from the landscapes in which I lived. My family moved every few years; I barely got to know a place before we moved again, never bothering to seriously try and set down ""roots.""
As a first-year graduate student in the heart of Iowa, I became friends with a number of budding writers and scholars who grew up with an entirely different mindset. Almost all of them were deeply interested in place, the environment, and how body and land are more intrinsically linked than we might otherwise believe. At our cozy shared office one day, one colleague dropped off Kingsolver's 2007 memoir, a year-long chronicle of her family's efforts and experiences to raise and grow as much of their food as possible. I didn't read it until the semester finished, when the freedom of summer allowed me to read, reflect, and honestly think about the text on a page.
Kingsolver is a beautiful writer, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is further proof of this. Scenes chronicling the gradual growth and progress of rhubarb, asparagus, tomatoes, and potatoes are described in poetic rhetoric, detailing such small changes with a clear sense of wonder, awe, and reverence. Beyond these observations and recordings, however, the books is laced with commentary about our contemporary food systems—farming, restaurants, soil management, corporatization, commodification and seed patents—and how alternatives exist, both small and large scale, right before our eyes.
I finished Kingsolver's book wanting—needing—to both eat differently and think more deeply about how I lived as a part of the natural landscape. Trips to nearby farmer markets, supporting local growers, spending my dollars on organic products, learning to garden, learning to cook—all of these were habits gleaned from her memoir, and behaviors that led to me becoming a more passionate environmental activist over time.
Most of the courses I teach are grounded in environmental concerns—climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, drought—and how we write about them. What's made Kingsolver's memoir not only a personal favorite, but a classroom jewel as well, is that her book is empowering: my students frequently note in course evaluations that this memoir not only revealed and informed them about the realities underlying their current relationship with food, but also provided them with tangible, pragmatic solutions about how they might incorporate changes. Sometimes, I am self-conscious and wary when talking about what my research and teaching interests concern. I am a late-bloomer with my environmental passions; I didn't grow up strongly intertwined with a sense of place or spend my formative years actively thinking about issues that bridge human and nonhuman worlds. Kingsolver's writing, and this memoir in particular, show that it's never too late to start paying attention, begin learning, or caring about where you live—an inspiring message that's never more timely and needed than it is today.","Barbara Kingsolver","Animal, Vegetable, Miracle",,2012,"Luke Rodewald, 28, English Ph.D. Student ",,,,,,page-garden-fridge,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Dr. Andy Mink, NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency","College Teaching,Environmental Activism,Environmental Humanities,Kingsolver, Barbara,Landscapes,Sustainability,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/463/1c87237f-a74f-4e08-a1ea-0f828425d293.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"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 modernized parallel text supplied in our edition. However, on day one of my first college-level Shakespeare course, my professor administered a reading exercise to acclimate us to the type of reading we’d be doing all semester. She gave each of us a printout of the following passage from Act 1, Scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet, wherein the lovers first meet:
ROMEO, [taking Juliet’s hand] If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: / My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, / Which mannerly devotion shows in this; / For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. / They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. [He kisses her.] / Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged. (Folger ed., 1.5.104-18)
A newcomer to Shakespeare, I felt confused and not the least bit intimidated after reading this passage silently to myself. I genuinely couldn’t sort the palms from the pilgrims. But once my professor began close reading the passage for us – the first time I’d witnessed such a mode of analysis – I felt my world expand. By tracing syntax and mapping out metaphors, she helped us see that it is Juliet who is both a temple and a saint, Romeo’s lips that are religious pilgrims, and the meeting of palms and prayer that are synonymous with the culminating romantic kiss. While these takeaways seem elementary to me now, they were ground-breaking to my sophomore self. Moreover, it wasn’t just these insights that made me choose this as my humanities moment. Rather, it was the moment when my professor taught us that Romeo and Juliet develop a shared sonnet in this scene. Together, they deliver fourteen, alternately rhyming lines in iambic pentameter – a whole Shakespearean sonnet. Within that sonnet, the initial “-iss” rhyme traverses Romeo’s first quatrain and into Juliet’s, providing a literary manifestation of their bond. Finally, each lover delivers one half of the final heroic couplet, and the close of their sonnet is literally sealed with the meeting of palms: a kiss.
For whatever reason (though it’s not hard to guess), this lesson vastly broadened what I thought language and, more generally, art were capable of. By showing us how to cipher the rich information harbored by this group of words, my professor sparked a drive in me to perform future such analyses and see how their revelations might further enhance the way I viewed the world. Now, I am a PhD student studying early modern English literature with a special interest in drama and poetry. I am still chasing the same feeling I got that day – the one where, as cheesy as it sounds, anything seemed possible through language. Luckily, I am still periodically graced with that sensation because, as all educators know, there is always more to read and learn!","William Shakespeare","Romeo and Juliet",,2016-2017,"Morgan Shaw, 23, Graduate Student",,,,,,capacious-language-romeo-juliet,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center summer residency orientation","College Teaching,Drama,Early Modern Literature,English Literature,Literature Appreciation,Shakespeare, William",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/457/balcony-2984316_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Humans Give Meaning to the World ",,"While discussing N. Scott Momaday's novel A House Made of Dawn, Professor Bowden introduced a new concept - geosophy. It was an unexpected moment during an undergraduate geography class that ultimately opened mental doors and windows to the world. Geosophy, an idea promoted by John Kirtland Wright in the 1940's, ""is the study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view. It is to geography what historiography is to history... it covers the geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner of people—not only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, business executives and poets, novelists and painters, Bedouins and Hottentots—and for this reason it necessarily has to do in large degree with subjective conceptions.""* In short, humans give meaning to the physical world.
I felt like I knew that before this moment. However, this humanities moment was a crossroad that never left me. In fact it caused a shift in my psyche. I remember feeling I understood life better, clearer, and with more agency. After all, the spirit of geosophy applies to everything external and physical (including other people), abstractions, events (past and present) and yourself. As a teacher I made sure I introduced this idea to my middle school and high school students. I remember seeing ""a-ha"" moments in their eyes. Things clicked. They were constructing meaning and felt empowered to explore and develop their ideas and convictions. It is like what Lionel Trilling reminded us; establishing systems of objectivity that people agree to and can interact in is the hardest, and most important, thing for humanity to develop.
*Quoted from:
Wright, J. K. Terrae incognitae: The place of the imagination in geography. Annals of Association of American Geographers, 1947, 37(1): 1-15.",,"This moment was inspired by Dr. Martyn Bowden during his class ""The End of America, Los Angeles.""",,"1992 ","Craig Perrier (46). Educator, curriculum specialist, teacher, adjunct, and digital history project designer.",,,,,,humans-give-meaning-to-the-world,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Clark University.","College Teaching,Geography,Geosophy,House Made of Dawn,Momaday, N. Scott,Subjectivity,Teachers & Teaching,Wright, John Kirtland",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/9/329/HM_Geography_Image.jpg,Text,"Teacher Advisory Council",1,0