By Lilian R. Furst (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) Through the Lens of the Reader is a sequence of ten essays exploring European narrative from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It covers a wide spectrum of authors ranging from Goethe through Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Henry James to Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Kafka. The essays are … Continued
By Erin A. Smith (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) Since the late nineteenth century, religiously themed books in America have been commercially popular yet scorned by critics. Working at the intersection of literary history, lived religion, and consumer culture, Erin A. Smith considers the largely unexplored world of popular religious books, examining the apparent tension between economic … Continued
The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic killed 50–100 million people worldwide, with the United States losing more people in the outbreak than it did in all the 20th and 21st century wars, combined. Arriving just as WWI was ending, the pandemic brought a non-human, invisible horror into every community. The viral tragedy has been largely hidden, but … Continued
The death of the book and the decline of literary reading have been threatened for over two decades now. How can the humble novel compete with the latest social media apps to capture our attention and connect us to others? And yet the experience of imaginative, immersive, literary reading endures and remains one of humanity’s … Continued
As a librarian, I am always reading, usually two to three books per week. During this time of social distancing and online learning, I have more time for reading at home and am gravitating toward longer Young Adult novels and more non-fiction. Encountering characters from a story and reading about historical events are social activities … Continued
When I was in middle school I came to love history, especially Russian history and Hitler’s Germany. This time period intrigued me, plus I learned if I read about communists and Nazis, teachers would leave me alone, and allow me to read. My father recommended George Orwell’s Animal Farm while I was in 8th grade. … Continued
In this audio recording, graduate student Jingyi Li describes how a late twentieth-century academic study of the book in Japan upended her expectations by rejecting the Eurocentric and Orientalist bias of many comparable scholarly works. Her experience with this text inspired her to move beyond her own linguistic insecurities and to continue with her research … Continued
My Humanities Moment involves a connection between two individuals that might not initially seem to have anything in common: Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino. One of the first places I found inspiration for the tenacity that has always kept me going through numerous personal and professional challenges was in the novels of Jane Austen. The … Continued
I hope I am not the only person who struggled to narrow their moment to a single episode. I am grateful for the prompt, though; in a summer full of dissertation writing and classroom prep, this prompt provided me an opportunity to appreciate how many times daily I interact with a humanities scholar or a … Continued
Transcript My name is Katelyn Campbell, and I’m a PhD student in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And for my humanities moment, I wanted to start by framing my work. So I study intentional communities, most specifically these very specific radical feminist communities in the 1970s called Womyn’s Lands. … Continued