Category: National Humanities Center Fellows

The Fish on Marchmont Street

I live and teach in Madison, Wisconsin, but I usually spend my spring break on a research trip in London, England. On a cold and drizzly day in…

Purple Heart, Purple Prose

Griswold recalls how a childhood encounter with a sentimental, “middlebrow” poem about a dog and a veteran (which makes her cry to this day) tapped into wells of…

Set on a Path by Socrates

As a college freshman, Thérèse Cory encountered Plato’s Socratic dialogue Euthyphro for the first time. Reading Socrates’ exhortations for Euthyphro—a man bringing charges of murder against his father—to…

Madonna’s Mandorla

While acting as a teaching assistant for a large art appreciation course, Caroline Jones witnessed a student’s curiosity about a painting of the Madonna. Such symbols, so pervasive…

Chronicling a Summer in Cinéma Vérité

For Peter Galison, an influential moment was seeing a film made in 1961 by an anthropologist and a sociologist, featuring a series of estival interviews with people on…

On the Anxiety of Influence

In this account, William E. Leuchtenburg shares the story of a seemingly routine exchange with literary scholars in the late 1970s which spurred him to new insights about…

Where Dreams Were Made and Humanistic Visions Forged

Throughout their son’s childhood, Stephen Hall’s parents, both children of sharecroppers, crafted a “deeply humanistic perch” from which he could “view the world.” Though possessing none of the…

Finding Freedom from the Familiar

In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in…

Sometimes You Just Need to Keep Reading

Growing up in the mid-1960s as a white girl in Tuskegee, Alabama, Mab Segrest attended a segregated private school that her parents had helped found in response to…

Inspirational Literature

In this video Marlene Daut describes how teaching literature to college students enables them to both understand their lives and history better, as well as be inspired regarding…

How Do You Get to the Stories We are Not Told?

Bernier shares how her lifelong interest in the history of slavery was sparked by curiosity about the stories that seemed to be missing in the account of the…

An Unexpected Insight

At the end of my sophomore year in high school, during the awards ceremony in June, I received my varsity letter for playing football. And then my history…

Harmonia est discordia concors: A Paean to Choral Singing

According to the ancient Greeks, harmony is discord rendered concordant, a concept that applied not just to music but everything from the order of the cosmos to human…

Resilience, Humility, and Picnics

I like picnics. Picnics take us outside, to share food with people we like. Those are my three favorite things, and picnics offer all three with a minimum…

Visiting the Art Museum

My family always visited art museums when I was a child. I’m not quite sure why, as we never talked about the art, and I wondered, in secret,…

Solving the “Very Complicated Puzzle” of How Humanity Lives

As a 21-year-old senior in college, Nancy Hirschmann encountered—and was forever changed by—German philosopher Hegel’s notoriously difficult passages in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Suddenly, she “broke through the…