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City Life/Living Cities lecture series graphic with skyscrapers and trees
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Phoenix Savage at her Human Touch Project
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Upcoming Events

May 28, 2013
Lecture: Seeking Places of Peace – Mennonites in North America
Part of the After Identity: Mennonite/s Writing in North America symposium.
May 29, 2013
Film: Silent Light
Part of the After Identity: Mennonite/s Writing in North America symposium.
May 30, 2013
Fiction Reading: Steven Byler
Part of the After Identity: Mennonite/s Writing in North America symposium.
→View All Upcoming Events

Michael Bérubé Letter from the Director

Greetings, friends and supporters of the Institute. After serving as president of the Modern Language Association for calendar year 2012 (the first president from Penn State in the 128-year history of the organization), I’m back in Ihlseng and eager to resume our work together.

While I was on leave, Dan Willis served as IAH Interim Director. Dan has returned to his position in the Department of Architecture, working on the massive Department of Energy building-retrofitting project in the Philadelphia Navy Yards. But while he was here, Dan and Associate Director Hester Blum took the Institute in a new direction, which I support wholeheartedly. Dan writes:

“Last year at the IAH we sought to expand our mission and our programming to engage undergraduate students more directly. Although the IAH organizes, sponsors, or co-sponsors numerous public events open to all students each semester, undergraduates have not necessarily been a primary target of our lectures, performances, and other initiatives. This past year, we intentionally chose a theme for our annual Fall Film Festival—college, college life, and life after college—that would be of interest to any student at Penn State and to members of the broader Centre County community.

“In a further effort to engage undergraduate students, for the first time we have also created two one-credit elective courses that parallel two of our signature fall events. In the first, taught by Professor of English Ben Schreier, students attended the Film Festival as well as a series of classes that examine the films and the themes within them. The second course connected with what is probably our most important annual event: the awarding of the Institute Medal for Distinguished Achievement. This year’s recipient is the Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee. English and Comparative Literature professor Jonathan Eburne and Women’s Studies/African and African American Studies professor Gabeba Baderoon created the course, ‘J. M. Coetzee and South African Literature.’ During his time at Penn State, Coetzee met with the students in that course.

“Through the creation of these two courses and others like them in the future, we are extending to undergraduates the opportunity to become more directly involved with IAH events. In turn, the IAH will continue to be active in reaching out to undergraduate students to enhance our own programming.“

It turns out that he one-credit courses were quite a hit. How do we know? Because the student evaluations included regrets that the courses didn’t involve more class meeting time. We’re confident that next fall’s IAH Medalist, singer/ songwriter/ artist/ poet/ photographer/ memoirist Patti Smith, will be every bit as exciting for students– and every bit as challenging as the subject of a one-credit course.

Last fall, we helped to host two fascinating conferences: “The Life and Death of American National Pastimes,” together with Mark Dyerson in Kinesiology and Steve Ross in the College of Law, and a summit meeting on graduate programs in the arts and humanities, convened with the help of Bill Doan in the College of Arts and Architecture. In the spring, we will partner with the Center for the Performing Arts and former IAH Director Marica Tacconi on CPA’s Classical Music Project, and with the College of Arts and Architecture’s celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. That celebration, scheduled for April 4–7, will include exhibitions of alumni work, lectures by distinguished alumni, campus and facility tours, alumni receptions, and a performance by students from the Schools of Music and Theatre of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS—a work scored for orchestra, marching and rock bands, actors and dancers

Our one-year postdoctoral/MFA position continues to generate great interest. Last year we received over 100 applications—from writers, poets, scholars, filmmakers, painters, and sculptors—for this position. Last spring, Phoenix Savage was selected as the 2012-13 IAH Fellow. Phoenix is a sculptor specializing in cast iron works. She holds an MFA from Georgia State University, and as a Fulbright Scholar, she traveled to Nigeria to learn traditional iron casting techniques. During her residency at Penn State, she will be pursuing her “Human Touch Project," which investigates the invisible space that exists when human beings connect by way of a simple touch. Phoenix is also teaching a course in the School of Visual Arts this spring: titled “400+1,” it is based on the Yoruba concept of expansion, and will use that concept to explore the infinite possibilities of process and production in the creation of works of art.

And, of course, we will continue our series of lectures on cities (specific South African cities last fall, ideas and ideals of cities in the spring) and our series of presentations by our terrific group of Resident Scholars and Artists. Please join us at these and other IAH events–and come see why the arts and humanities are thriving at Penn State.

Michael Bérubé
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature
Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University

Being Humans

What does it mean, and what has it meant, to be human? What might "the human" mean in the foreseeable and unforeseeable future? These are the questions that animate the arts and humanities– and that will define the work of Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Beginning in 2010-11, the Institute will offer programming devoted to exploring the question of "the human" from all angles.

For artists and humanists, these are extraordinary times: as the fate of our planet hangs in the balance, our sense of "the human" is undergoing remarkable challenges and transformations. How should we understand our relation to animal cognition, to artificial intelligence, to the biosphere, to disability, to prostheses, to genetics? Can research into our evolutionary inheritance actually help us understand how and why we create art and literature? Can we imagine a form of humanism in which the boundaries of the human are unclear and unstable? Artists, performers, and humanists must be central to these debates– and to every deliberation of what it means to be human.