In this short video, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns recalls having Robert Penn Warren read a passage from his novel All the King’s Men during the production of the Huey Long portion of his documentary series “Ken Burns’ America.” He notes that it is voices like Warren’s that have helped animate his work, bringing to life … Continued
As the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has engulfed the planet, most public discourse in the United States has focused on epidemiological characteristics of the disease, the strain it has placed on global healthcare resources and supply chains, the economic devastation it has wrought, and the merits of government response. Often unnoticed in those conversations, however, are the ways that those discussions are steeped in humanistic as much as scientific terms.
During this grief and loss, many are turning to the arts for emotional support, but the COVID-19 crisis is also a place for the humanities. Where the arts provide individual expression and connection, the humanities help us make meaning and find understanding on a collective level.
Fellows have produced a wide assortment of fascinating and award-winning books this year. We asked four of them to share a little about their new publications and to reflect on the process of writing them.
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.”
How can teachers help students draw connections between humanities and STEM subjects? In this podcast, Omar Ali, professor of history and Dean of Lloyd International Honors College at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Andromeda Crowell, who teaches science at Orange High School in Hillsborough, NC, discuss similarities in the ways historians and scientists approach the process of discovery. They also consider how digital technologies have made it easier for students to think and act like researchers, regardless of discipline, in a classroom setting.
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.
On October 5, 2016, NHC director Robert D. Newman delivered a keynote address as a part of the ongoing Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Speaker Series at North Carolina Central University. In his remarks Newman touched on events as seemingly disparate as the workings of the Continental Congress and the social media origins of the Black Lives Matter movement and discussed the ways that the humanities help us understand the world, relate to one another, and come to terms with the most profound experiences and questions — on the nature of beauty, the search for justice, and the meaning of life in the face of horrific violence and our own mortality.