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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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A Movie That Stayed Longer than I Expected

It was a balmy October night in 2017, when I lay pondering in a tiny rented room in a city that wasn’t “home” both literally as well as…

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…