In this short essay from Inside Higher Ed, Robert D. Newman argues that to “manifest their relevance and preserve their viability” the humanities “...need to make alliances with and contributions to multidisciplinary initiatives focused on the numerous crises in humanity, not humanities. Resolutions to seemingly intractable problems require comprehensive approaches, including a humanities perspective.”
Time Out with Bill Hendrickson is a weekly radio program on WCOM–LP 103.5 FM, community radio for Chapel Hill and Carrboro, NC. The show features in-depth interviews with interesting figures from education, business, sports, entertainment, and other arenas of public life. In this episode, host Bill Hendrickson interviews Robert D. Newman, president and director of the National Humanities Center.
On October 12, 2019, National Humanities Center President and Director Robert D. Newman will be honored as a distinguished alumnus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received his Ph.D. in English. This follows closely on the heels of another honor Newman received in April when he was the inaugural recipient of a distinguished alumnus award from the Humanities Institute at Penn State.
In this essay from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert D. Newman writes, “The principles grounded in the humanities—notions of character, responsibility, civility, empathy, inquiry, collaboration, the public good, the heroic, beauty, and truth—are also at the center of the revolutionary idealism which forged our Constitution. While the antidote to the Age of Loneliness is not easily conjured, it needs a political as well as scientific response—that is, it will need the lessons we can learn through the humanities.”
Adapted from a keynote address given at North Carolina Central University, Robert D. Newman's essay on the vital importance of the humanities in addressing contemporary issues appears in the collection, The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo and Christian Lux, recently published by Northwestern University Press.
This scholarly roundtable, featuring Center Fellows in conversation with NHC President and Director Robert D. Newman, explored the important role for humanists in ongoing public discourse about climate change. Touching on topics such as environmental justice and indigenous peoples, the economic history and lasting legacies of deforestation in Latin America, and the shift in demand for fossil fuels to support global military conflicts, these scholars discussed how the human element must be accounted for as we struggle to shape climate policies for the twenty-first century.
How should humanities institutions and practitioners respond to ongoing challenges to their value and significance? In this opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed, Robert D. Newman revisits a fable from Benjamin Franklin's "Apology for Printers" to argue that humanists should be wary of responding defensively to critics lest we see "a continued dwindling of the imaginative, interrogative and empathetic impulses core to the humanities."
In this essay from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert D. Newman points to profound links between humanistic and ecological thinking and argues for “a restoration of a poetics of ecology and an ecological humanism.”
In this wide-ranging interview with Conversation host Mitchell Lewis, National Humanities Center President Robert D. Newman discusses the significance of the humanities in everyday life, the enduring importance of humanities scholarship, and the mission of the National Humanities Center to advance humanities research, teaching, and public engagement. This program originally aired on UNC-TV’s NC Channel on June 27, 2017.
In a wide-ranging talk to alumni Fellows that incorporated stories about figures as distinct as H. L. Mencken, Georgia O’Keefe, and Mary Oliver, NHC president Robert D. Newman discussed how the humanities lend perspective to current events, refine our sense of the world and all it contains, and provide wisdom for navigating the future.