Public Humanities
Initiative
Humanities Research Center
Rice University
Civic Humanists Visit High School Classrooms
This program for Houston-area high schools, especially those with student populations currently underrepresented at Rice University, will bring faculty from the School of Humanities at Rice to high school classrooms to present new scholarship in their fields and to provide an introduction to college-level topics and approaches.
From the list below, interested teachers may identify a speaker and topic that would suit their classrooms. Topics include literary analysis, American history, religious studies, media studies, and linguistics. To request a professor to visit your classroom, please contact the Office of K-12 Initiatives at Rice.
Availability is limited. Once a match is made and visit has been scheduled, you and the professor will meet beforehand to talk over the lesson plan. The professor will want to know about the ideas and terms already current in your class. Typically, the professor will make a brief presentation and, with your guidance and leadership, will incorporate active learning strategies.
These faculty members have been encouraged not to over-simplify their work, but to present their richest ideas and conclusions. Your students will thus have exposure to college-level learning in the humanities.
April DeConick presents a history of the Bible to students at Carnegie Vanguard High School (10/14/09)
See Rice News profile of the Civic Humanists here (11/20/08).
The following professors are still available to visit a high school classroom this year.
How the City Changed Everything We Think about Ourselves
Terrence Doody, Professor of English
This will be a talk on the historical development of the novel, the history of the idea of the individual, and what happens when the self is outnumbered by one million to one in big nineteenth-century urban settings.
Multiculturalism in France
Julie Fette, Assistant Professor of French Studies
Like Americans, the French are a people of diverse cultures, ethnicities, and religions. Both nations espouse the democratic principles of liberty and equality. But France and the United States differ significantly in how they integrate (or not) minorities into their societies. The talk will focus on issues of immigration, secularism, and affirmative action.
How to Read the Aeneid
Scott McGill, Associate Professor of Classical Studies
An introduction to major problems of interpretation of an epic poem. How much history is necessary for interpretation? How much is too much? How much literary history? What makes the Aeneid an epic poem? Besides the “epic voice,” how many “further voices” in Virgil’s poem do we hear?
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Language (but Were Afraid to Ask)
Nancy Niedzielski, Associate Professor of Linguistics
Language is a fascinating phenomenon: a highly complex system with infinite varieties, but we pick it up and understand each other with amazing ease. Though intimately linked with our culture, identity, past, and future, hundreds of languages are on the brink of extinction. Perhaps most fascinating is the capacity of us speakers - of any given language - to believe vast numbers of falsehoods. This talk will present some of the surprising truisms about language that we linguists have discovered.
Medicine and Media: How Doctor Shows on Television Teach Us About Health
Kirsten Ostherr, Associate Professor of English
In the intersecting fields of media studies and medical humanities, Dr. Ostherr offers a discussion of the depiction of medical technology in popular television programs such as Grey's Anatomy, House, M.D., and C.S.I., and the role these images play in shaping patient experiences in clinical settings. These more recent hit TV shows will be placed in context through comparison with older films and television shows that offer a different perspective on the practice of medicine.
The following professors have already visited a high school this year. They are listed below to show the range of topics that are available.
Brown v. Board: Antecedents and Legacies
Alexander X. Byrd, Associate Professor of History
Dr. Byrd explores the deep roots and ambiguous aftermath of the modern black freedom movement through the lens of an iconic American civil rights case. Are we all better off because of Brown?
Reading Bleeding Trees
Joseph Campana, Assistant Professor of English
Following an epic trope, the bleeding tree, from classical sources to Shakespeare, we can assess the relationship between literature and the lived experience of pain, suffering, and sympathy. Is pain experienced differently across histories, cultures, and bodies? Might pain provide a sense of common experience that creates networks of sympathy and community?
How Did the Bible Come to Be?
April DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies
The Bible and the stories it tells are familiar to almost everyone in America, yet how familiar are we with its own story, its own history as a book? In the early 1920s, in a debate over using Spanish or English in the schools, Texas Governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson is quoted as saying, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas!" But wait a minute: the language Jesus spoke would have been one of the languages in existence during his time and place, most likely Aramaic, a common dialect of Hebrew spoken in Galilee at the time. Ma Ferguson didn't know her Bible history. In order to illuminate the Bible's history as a book, this talk will trace the history of the Bible itself, from its oral beginnings, to its written Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, to its modern translations.
Re-Envisioning the World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Fourth Dimension
Nicole Waligora-Davis, Assistant Professor of English
Sociologist, historian, Pan-Africanist, founding member of the N.A.A.C.P., and long time editor of Crisis magazine, W.E.B. Du Bois is among the most noteworthy civil rights activists, humanitarians, and American intellectuals of the 20th century. As part of his critique of racial discrimination and failed U.S. policies on civil rights, Du Bois offered a blueprint for an alternative democracy—“the fourth dimension”—in which education and young people played a central role. Du Bois’ vision for a new, peaceful world challenges us today to consider the obligations we have to members of our society and to humanity. While it has been almost ninety years since his earliest formulations on this idea, and many decades since the Civil Rights Movement, what lessons may we continue to draw in the 21st century from Du Bois’s vision of democracy and citizenship?
The HRC
The Humanities Research Center at Rice University serves to foster research and interest in the humanities, broadly understood.
Through funding of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate student fellowships; interdisciplinary workshops; international conferences; external faculty visitors; document archives; research seminars; and most recently its Public Humanities Initiative, the HRC strives to broaden the scope and depth of humanities-based conversations throughout the larger intellectual community.