In partnership with humanists and humanities organizations across the country, the National Humanities Center is supporting 16 public events across the US. These community-focused events, organized and presented by local artists, scholars, and educators, highlight the incredible breadth of the humanities and demonstrate how they add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us.
The National Humanities Center will host a summit for K–12 teachers from Tulsa, OK, on June 13, 2024. Entitled Artificial Intelligence and Digital Literacy: Toward an Inclusive Practice, it will provide an immersive, hands-on learning experience connecting teachers with scholars working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital literacy, and the humanities.
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects explore how computing has reshaped thinking around everything from political power to literary study and how the promises and perils of technological advances are best measured through a humanistic lens.
“Absent a humanities perspective, solutions to racial divides, environmental degradation, climate change, immigration, water rights and resources, food consumption, geopolitical cataclysms, and the implementation of new technologies will remain incomplete. Technology cannot assess the multiple masks of evil, the complicated ethics of choice, the pain of loss, the joys of love, or the frustrations and … Continued
The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes.
We will fund four partnerships between NHC Institutional Sponsors and community colleges or Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to teach responsible AI courses on both campuses during the 2025–2026 school year. Beginning in 2024, these partnerships will ensure that nuanced AI education is more widely available across institution types and will enhance pedagogical relationships between the two institutions. In addition, all faculty who participate in this program will develop materials which will be published by the NHC.
In 2021, the NHC began a partnership with Google to reimagine the training needed to live and work ethically and responsibly with AI technologies. This resulted in mentorship provided to university faculty across the country as they develop curriculum from a humanities perspective on responsible AI. We hosted 23 university faculty from 15 institutions in building courses that introduce methodologies developed in humanities disciplines to students on the topic of responsible AI.
In Birth of the Geopolitical Age, Shellen Xiao Wu demonstrates how global examples of frontier settlements refracted through China’s unique history and informed the making of the modern Chinese state. Wu weaves a narrative that moves through time and space, the lives of individuals, and empires’ rise and fall and rebirth.
Born in Moscow in 1949, Olga Sedakova emerged as a leading writer of the late Soviet period. Since 2014, she has been an outspoken critic of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Her writing bears witness to the values of generosity, attention, and non-violence. The poems in Old Songs construct a world shaped by these values, forming a lyric sequence infused with folk wisdom and anchored in moral courage.
Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture.