Promoting collaborative research on ideas

central to the pressing issues of our time.

Humanities Institute Annual Event 2024

Wednesday, March 27 at 4:00pm
110 Robb Hall, Hintz Family Alumni Center

María Cristina García is the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Cornell University. While Garcia considers herself primarily a historian of 20th century U.S. history, her interest in displaced and mobile populations has increasingly blurred the geographic borders of her work. Click here to learn more about the speaker. This event will be followed by a reception for attendees.

Kobi Kabalek, Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies

Tuesday, March 19th, 2024, Noon-1:00pm. 124 Sparks Building

Lunch will be provided.

Countless wartime diaries and postwar memoirs of Holocaust victims integrate images, concepts, and episodes from fictional horror tales and films drawn from diverse cultural environments. They speak of Nazis as real-world incarnations of horrific fictional figures, such as vampires, mention terrifying monsters from Jewish apocalyptic traditions, and depict ghettos and camps as actual manifestations of medieval depictions of hell. I argue that in the very blurring the boundaries between the real and unreal, the historical and fantastic, these victims’ accounts display familiar features of horror, a feeling that emerges in extreme situations and articulates the breakdown of social expectations and modern conceptions of humanity. These features stand at the heart of many responses to Nazism and the Holocaust also today, exposing the fragility of human conduct and modern ethics and questioning the boundaries between “civilization” and “barbarism.” My project explores Holocaust victims’ horror depictions in order to unravel their authors’ contemplations of the very definition of humanity and the borders of rationality and civilized sociality.

Click here to learn more about this semester’s Resident Lecture Series.

Our Spring graduate scholars, Zinhle Ka’Nobuhlaluse, Su Young Lee, and Brooke Tybush, will be presenting their work on Tuesday, April 9 at Noon to 1:00 p.m, in 124 Sparks. Read more about their projects by clicking on their photos below:

The Graduate Scholars in Residence program provides students in the humanities with a one-course teaching release or summer funding, enabling them to devote an entire semester to work on their dissertations.

Episode 8 of HumIn Focus, “To Be Indigenous: Learning with Native Peoples” premiered on WPSU on February 22nd, 2024, at 9:00 p.m. 📰 Click here to read the release announcement in the news.

HumIn Focus is a multi-part web series centering on pressing social issues through the lens of the work of humanities scholars. To learn more about the web series, visit the HumIn Focus website.

Humanities Works Logo

As part of a university initiative to create synergies across the Penn State University system, faculty at the Harrisburg and Greater Allegheny Penn State campuses, have produced a video series promoting the value of Humanities education, called “Humanities Works”.  The series is produced by Rosemary Martinelli and Catherine Rios.

Visit Commonwealth Campuses Collaboration Programs to view the recordings from this series.

Humanities Institute: Humanities in the World Logo

The Humanities in the World initiative includes funding for Visiting Scholars, Postdoctoral Scholars, and our Faculty Invites program.

Learn more about the Initiative
Find out more about Programming Resources for Commonwealth Campuses

March 19, 2024
noon–1:00 p.m.
124 Sparks Building
March 21, 2024
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m.
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library
March 27, 2024
4:00 p.m.
110 Robb Hall, Hintz Family Alumni Center
March 28, 2024
6:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.
Freeman Auditorium, 117 HUB-Robeson Center

Message from Director John Christman

Dear Humanities Institute Community,

We hope your year is going well.  We are in the midst of an exciting year of events, visitors, programs and initiatives at the Institute and from the people and units we support. 

We are re-doubling our commitment to the core themes in our Institute mission, including support for collaborative work in humanities fields, to foment and support work in these fields that contributes to social justice efforts, and to generally stress the broad social value of humanities and its related areas of scholarship.

We continue with our Public Humanities Fellowship program with another full class of Fellows in the Introduction to Public Humanities course last fall and Capstone class this spring. We are excited to see what these great creative scholars will produce in their effort to create socially productive dialogue about currently pressing issues.

Thanks to the Humanities in the World Initiative, we are again able to host a full cohort of Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Scholars at Ihlseng Cottage.  We have been introducing these scholars to the wider community and will continue to do so.  Two postdocs in this group are connected to the Mellon-funded Just Transformations Initiative, a multi-faceted project geared toward building and sustaining diverse communities in higher education.  These scholars will join our line-up of Penn State faculty and graduate students who have been awarded our Resident Fellowships for this academic year.

Our Emmy-nominated documentary series, HumIn Focus, continues its production in cooperation with WPSU and the Bellisario College of Communication.  Co-executive producer Matt Jordan and I are excited about our new episodes this coming year.  Our latest, which was broadcast on February 22, was “To Be Indigenous: Learning with Native Peoples”.  The episode can be accessed here:

In addition, we are hosting a number of events that have been proposed by our faculty through our Faculty Invites process.  Stay tuned for announcements of these exciting lectures, workshops and conferences.

We look forward to a great year for the humanities community and beyond!

John C.

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Staff picture at the Ihlseng Cottage

Acknowledgement of Land

The Pennsylvania State University campuses are located on the original homelands of the Erie, Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora), Lenape (Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe, Stockbridge-Munsee), Shawnee (Absentee, Eastern, and Oklahoma), Susquehannock, and Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nations. As a land grant institution, we acknowledge and honor the traditional caretakers of these lands and strive to understand and model their responsible stewardship. We also acknowledge the longer history of these lands and our place in that history.