Humanities Hub

Gregory Smoak, associate professor of history and director of the American West Center, was recently on KUER’s Radiowest discussing agriculture, water policy and the Great Salt Lake. Smoak joined guests Joel Ferry, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources and farmers from Box Elder County.

Andy King, associate professor of communication, was recently interviewed on Marketplace Tech about how technology, specifically photos, memes and video, can easily spread misinformation. “The way that people process visual content generally is different than how they process verbal content. And so, for visual misinformation, people will process it differently, they’ll be able to access it differently and how they integrate that information into their existing mental models of how the world works will be affected differently...”

The John R. Park Debate Society continued its Spring 2023 season with a small contingent of competitors at the Jannese Davidson Memorial Tournament hosted by Concordia University-Irvine. Over the weekend, members of the Debate Society competed against 28 colleges and universities from eight states, including Bradley University, George Mason University, San Diego State University, the University of California at Berkley, and Point Loma Nazarene University. For their efforts, competitors competed in elimination rounds in 12 events, and every member of the team brought home an award. Senior Ryan Knippel also won the Ninja-Pixie Individual Sweepstakes Award, given to the student who earns the most points across debate and individual events. The Debate Society will continue its season on February 4-5 at the Gaske Memorial Invitational hosted by San Diego State University.

The College of Humanities and Department of Communication are proud to announce a partnership with Utah Hockey to offer internships in Sports Media Production, Broadcast, and Creation.

The John R. Park Debate Society opened its Spring 2023 competitive season at home by hosting the Great Salt Lake Invitational and the UTEP Classic with tournament cohosts, the University of Texas-El Paso. The "swing" tournament allows schools attending to compete in two tournaments on the same weekend, doubling opportunities for students.

More than a decade ago, Natalie Stillman-Webb, writing and rhetoric studies professor/lecturer at the University of Utah, was paying for her children’s tennis lessons when the front desk attendant said he recognized her name from an online class he had taken the previous semester. After asking the young man’s name, she remembered an excellent paper he had written and commented on it. However, he was confused. He knew he had seen her name before but did not realize that the robot he thought ran his online class was a living, breathing member of the university faculty.

Reactionary politics and climate change are connected. At the dawn of 2023 that connection may seem obscure, but ongoing droughts, mega-storms and displaced people will aggravate America’s existing political tensions.

We have accomplished a great deal in Fall 2022! As we head toward the holidays and a second appearance in the Rose Bowl (yay!), I want to note and celebrate a few items. We’ve added several excellent new members to the College of Humanities Dean’s office team, including Karen Marsh, Director of Student Success and Engagement, who will lead initiatives to provide staff, departments, and the advising team with new tools to ensure we have successful and engaged students; Cameron Vakilian, Director of Advising, Outreach, and Experiential Learning; and Missy Weeks, Marketing Specialist for the Tanner Humanities Center.

Cameron Vakilian has accepted the position of director of advising, outreach, and experiential learning for the University of Utah’s College of Humanities and will begin January 1. Vakilian will work in conjunction with the college’s new director for student success and engagement, Karen Marsh Schaeffer. In this new role, Vakilian will provide support to the advising community across the college’s departments and programs and will support and innovate the college’s effort to attract new students to the humanities and connect them with world-class learning opportunities.

In his course, Empathy, Medicine and the Human Condition, Joseph Metz, associate professor of German at the University of Utah, begins every day by leading his students through contemplative breathing exercises. Depending on the day, they spend between five and ten minutes doing these exercises before moving on to analyzing and discussing the literature they read for homework. Metz says that starting class this way helps students access their power of awareness and gets them back in touch with their own processing of an experience; this then assists them in approaching the text with a heightened awareness.

The John R. Park Debate Society wrapped up its fall season in Norwalk, California on December 4-6, 2022, participating in the PSCFA Fall Champs Invitational. The team had 14 final-round appearances and completed a sweep of NDA-LD debate, earning the top three spots in the event.

In his 1993 essay, “Black to the Future,” the cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism.” He defined Afrofuturism as a genre of speculative fiction which “addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture” and which includes “images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” In the thirty years since its coinage, the term has infiltrated literary and academic discourse, and become a popular and powerful framework for imagining Black futures. But Andrew Shephard, assistant professor in English at the University of Utah, wants to push back on one basic aspect of Afrofuturism: its emphasis on the future.

I was standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn, NY in April as the sun was just hitting the top of the station. I was on the phone with my parents who were back home, almost four hundred miles away in Norwood, NY. I was finishing my gap year between my undergraduate degree and the start of my graduate program at the University of Utah in the fall. I had just gotten the news that I would be working with the Tanner Humanities Center to help facilitate events with writers and humanists on campus.

On November 14th, the Digital Matters Lab at the J. Willard Marriott Library will host “Embodied Ecologies,” a collaborative exhibition focused on disability, environmental health and community care practices in Salt Lake City. Rooted in a partnership between the Environmental Humanities graduate program housed in the College of Humanities at the University of Utah and Art Access, a local non-profit organization dedicated to increasing accessibility in the arts, the “Embodied Ecologies” installation will bring together the work of seven U affiliated artists working in sculpture, poetry, textile, paint, film and mixed media.

Karen Marsh Schaeffer has accepted the position of director of student success and engagement for the University of Utah’s College of Humanities and will begin November 16. Marsh Schaeffer will direct and oversee operations and strategic planning of student service functions and will act as the liaison for departments, faculty, staff, students and external entities to ensure continuity and quality of student services.

There have always been Jewish communities in Africa and since the advent of the internet, more groups have become more widely known. These deeply rooted Jewish communities partake in religious practices which were previously outlawed by European colonizers (such as male circumcision, Saturday Sabbath, menstrual seclusion, etc.), as well as customs such as animal sacrifice, which are no longer practiced in Rabbinic Judaism. Many members of these groups have thought themselves to be descendants from the Lost Tribes – the Ten Tribes of Israel which were supposedly exiled from Israel in 722 BCE. European colonizers and missionaries believed such groups to be part of these tribes because, according to the Old Testament in the Bible, only Jews performed these practices.

In 2016, a C-Span call went viral when a white caller who proclaimed himself prejudiced asked Heather McGhee, author of “The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” how to overcome his racial bias and be a better American. She graciously thanked him for acknowledging his fears and prejudices and outlined a path forward by providing achievable changes to mend racial divides. She advised him – and everyone – to get to know black families, join a black church, understand that nightly news over-represents black crime and under-represents white crime and to become educated about the history of African Americans in this country.

In Utah today, we can look around the Salt Lake Valley and point out landmarks. The Great Salt Lake. Millcreek Canyon. The Oquirrh Mountains. But to the Western Shoshone, the Great Salt Lake is Pia-pa or Titsa-pa, meaning “great water” or “bad water.” Millcreek Canyon is Tempin-Tekkoappah, “rock trap.” To the Goshute, the Oquirrhs are called Apa-ya-wi-up, “place of the weeping ancestors.” These places all had other names before.

The U.S. Department of State announced the selection of Karen Marsh Schaeffer of University of Utah for a six-month virtual English Language Specialist project focusing on student motivation and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Russia at Dostoevsky Omsk State University. Marsh Schaeffer is part of a select group, as her project is one of approximately 240 that the English Language Specialist Program supports each year.

The Department of Communication is pleased to announce that Kent A. Ono, professor of communication, has been named a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. Ono is the first representative from the University of Utah to receive the honor. The recognition is given to those who have attained “a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication. Recipients are selected to showcase the communication profession.”