Humanities in Action

Much of the humanities is about getting people to see things that have become invisible, things so taken for granted that we no longer notice or question them. Lisa Swanstrom’s new project, Synthetic Futures, is about one such invisible object: plastic.

Indigenous peoples have for centuries remained “nearly nonexistent in the American book of poetry,” writes former United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. This absence forms part of a more significant problem in American culture, “indigenous peoples of our country are often invisible.” However, hundreds if not thousands of Native Nations poets are working today, and perhaps none has done as much to restore their visibility as Harjo.

With a gift of property, Melody Taft is establishing a $1M arts endowment at the University of Utah’s Taft-Nicholson Center. Taft is a founding supporter of the center and has donated her 160-acre ranch in Centennial Valley to the university. The endowment will be funded with proceeds from the sale of the property and will be administered by the director of the center. Earnings on the endowment will be used to support arts programming, including expenses associated with the Artists-In-Residence program and arts programming.

It’s common for aspiring or current College of Humanities majors to be asked, “what are you going to do with that?” This question elicits frustration and annoyance for many students, including myself, as I received this question plenty of times during my collegiate years. Misconceptions, myths and negative stereotypes, furthermore, still swirl around what jobs are available to this student population or what sectors they are confined to. For example, the idea that majoring in a language only “qualifies” an individual to be a language instructor is not uncommon.

With more than 150 students attending the University of Utah who are graduates of the Bridge Program for Advanced Language Learning – a language program for Utah high school students to earn college credit before graduation – the U offers a number of opportunities for students to advance and apply their language skills in academic and career settings.

In honor of the late University of Utah philosophy professor David Wells Bennett (1927-2014), his family has established an endowed scholarship in his name. The Department of Philosophy invites friends and family of Bennett to support the fund so more philosophy students can receive the necessary financial assistance to study in his honor.

Alyssa Quinn, who is working toward a doctorate degree in creative writing in the Department of English, has written her debut novel, “Habilis,” to be released Sept. 13, 2022. She recently spoke with the Salt Lake Tribune about her idea to write a book that incorporated theories of human language.

The University of Utah’s College of Humanities and Department of Communication are partnering with Tunisha Brown, founder and editor-in-chief of IMPACT Magazine to provide internship opportunities to students and to work toward digitally archiving the magazine’s 15-year history of empowering Black women and men.

The banning of literature and the silencing of authors continues to be on the rise. The news is full of stories of books being pulled from the shelves of public school libraries. In August, prizewinning author Salman Rushdie was attacked onstage after decades of hiding in response to death threats for his book, "The Satanic Verses.” According to Azar Nafisi, bestselling author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” books are a threat to those who seek to rule through absolutism. Their power resides in the way they allow us to imagine lives lived differently from our own and to resist the imposition of any one particular way of life.