In this article, the author shares how she designs fun and fascinating western humanities courses at a community college in Minnesota. Using the example provided by many excellent past instructors, and through numerous late-night research sessions, she began to develop techniques and exercises that would help her achieve her goals in the…

"Popular culture" and "culture studies" have become mainstays of the humanities in higher education. Like most other humanities courses, popular culture courses today mainly serve the usual politically correct program of the existing dominant class in the academy. Nevertheless, such courses can also be a powerful tool for instructors who wish to…

The authors wished to evaluate whether their collection housed the resources that their humanities faculty needed (and actually used) for their research, with the hope of providing additional illumination about general resource use by humanities scholars. This study asks not whether anyone used what was already owned, but instead whether the…

Even very young children can show an interest in the humanities. Although they may not be pursuing degrees in the arts or languages, they often pursue answers to profound questions about human existence in casual conversation. Supporting a young child in his or her quest to discover more about these questions may lead to new insights for parents,…

The success of partnerships between universities and communities, especially partnerships involving Research I universities, is often undermined by divergent goals and timetables. Whereas a community organization might imagine its timetable for achieving a certain goal in years or even decades, the goals of faculty members working at high-pressure…

Founding humanists argued that counseling should be ideologically grounded in the humanities. Currently, professional counseling culture is largely structured by scientific assumptions, which, the author maintains, have had a detrimental impact on the profession. Specific recommendations for shifting professional counseling culture to a humanities…

This article offers reflections arising from a recent colloquium at the Open University on the implications of the development of digital humanities for research in arts disciplines, and also for their interactions with computing and technology. Particular issues explored include the ways in which the digital turn in humanities research is also a…

Militarization and a military definition of life and culture have become normalized in the United States. This article explores the ways in which a military metaphysics has become the new normal for a nation not only at war abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against youth, immigrants, and…

In recent years, a more sophisticated vocabulary has emerged in the field of higher education. Categories such as" socially relevant research"; "knowledge mobilization"; "research impact"; "innovation"; and "university priorities" have appeared. At first glance, these words may appear neutral,…

Though the notion of the "problem" is central to self-directed and research-like problem-oriented learning approaches in universities, few studies have focused on how students themselves conceptualize it. The purpose of this study is to investigate how university students communicatively frame "the problem-oriented problem" in…

Writing Center faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina teach humanities courses in which we include literary texts that are not ostensibly "about health care" to introduce to students how unique an illness narrative can be--to challenge, in fact, preconceived notions student may have about what "counts" as a…

Recent scholarship claims that American colleges and universities give less and less attention to the meaning of life. In this article we critically evaluate the historical arguments for this claim, focusing primarily on the account given by Anthony Kronman. We argue that Kronman's history proves particularly problematic if one wants to…

This article discusses how mapping techniques were used in university teaching in a humanities subject. The use of concept mapping was expanded as a pedagogical tool, with a focus on reflective learning processes. Data were collected through a longitudinal study of concept mapping in a university-level Classics course. This was used to explore how…

Readers of this journal probably know how the peer review process works in the humanities disciplines and at various journals. Therefore the author explains how the law review process generally works and then what the humanities can learn and borrow from the law review process. He ends by advocating for a hybrid law review/peer review approach to…

This dissertation presents a new tool for exploratory text analysis that attempts to improve the experience of navigating and exploring text and its metadata. The design of the tool was motivated by the unmet need for text analysis tools in the humanities and social sciences. In these fields, it is common for scholars to have hundreds or thousands…