In the summer of 2009, Crystal Rudds took an internship with the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights. She was stationed in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Rowhouses, a public housing project that was facing demolition. That summer, she stood alongside tenants to protest the demolition of the development. It was an experience that would shape the rest of her academic career.

Kevin Coe, professor of communication at the University of Utah, explores how messages matter. After growing up in Tacoma, WA, Coe moved to Illinois to complete his doctorate and then taught at the University of Arizona for five years. After spending time in the desert, he was searching for water, trees and mountains — so, in 2013, he moved to Salt Lake.

The Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah is proud to announce that Whyte, associate professor of philosophy at Michigan State University and an expert in environmental philosophy and indigenous knowledge systems, will be speaking at the UMFA Dumke Auditorium, April 4, 2023, 7 p.m. Whyte will discuss some of his research on Climate Change through an Intersectional Lens and the role of gender in indigenous peoples climate change experience.

As editor of the prestigious German Studies Review, Katharina Gerstenberger, professor of German at the University of Utah, uses the opportunity to foster an international community within the German Studies discipline.

Science and the humanities seem to be the oil and water of academia. In a black-and-white world, these two fields are opposites, two fields of study with not just a picket fence dividing them but a concrete wall. A man crossing this divide and blurring these lines is Stephen Downes, professor of philosophy and adjunct professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah.

The Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah is pleased to host award winning science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson for The Tanner Lecture on Human Values Thursday March 16, 2023, at 7 p.m. at Kingsbury Hall.

Associate Professor Mark Bergstrom was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western States Communication Association. The WSCA Distinguished Service Award is the highest honor bestowed by the Western States Communication Association.

When first-year students at the University of Utah step inside the classroom of HUM 1500: Great Books in the Humanities, they will not only begin to explore seven global texts that have changed minds and influenced generations, but they will also learn how each of these books has been interpreted and understood by scholars from seven different disciplines. A team of leading professors from the departments of communication, English, history, world languages and cultures, linguistics, philosophy, and writing and rhetoric studies will lead first-year students in close reading of transformative books from each of these fields, offering students a unique opportunity to engage across the humanities.

Utah is home to several organizations whose missions prioritize education, research, and community outreach, but the long-standing partnership between the American West Center (AWC) and Utah Humanities (UH) in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution’s Travelling Exhibitions Services (SITES) Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program, has been especially fruitful. By combining their individual strengths, they have cultivated an approach to “doing history” that not only demonstrates the discipline’s importance, but also its ability to help people and communities more meaningfully connect to the past, each other, and to their own time and place.