humanities

By Paul O’Keeffe

The European Union has led the way in terms of integrating art into teaching practices at schools to better enhance the integration and mental well-being of refugee children. Various projects provide learning opportunities and resources for teachers to enable their students to better cope with the realities of their lives in exile.

By Alain Duplouy

From 1924 to 1931, Paul Bigot built an astonishingly audacious building made of steel and concrete behind an envelope of red bricks mirroring Venetian architecture. In its conception, the Institut d’art et d’archéologie was not only a facility for teaching but also a laboratory, a place for “science in the making.”

By Guido Antinori

At the Institut d’art et d’archéologie, the collection of ancient Iranian seal impressions not only offers the students of the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne direct access to a large corpus of Oriental iconography but also allows them to train in the creation of relational databases.

By Vincenzo Capozzoli

The collections of the Department of Art History and Archeology have been at the center of a project aiming at establishing an inventory of, studying, and disclosing the department’s cultural heritage. The VERGILIUS portal stands as an example of digital management for archaeological heritage, offering promising prospects for the future of research, education, and cultural preservation.

By Mariana Silva Porto and Mathilde Castéran

Jean Deshayes was a respected scholar of Near Eastern archaeology, who played a central role in the establishment of the Department of Art History and Archaeology after the creation of the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1970.

By Katalin Ámon

When teaching about homelessness, the risk is to present homeless people as passive subjects.

By Sonja Evaldsson Mellström

European migration studies have traditionally failed to recognize how empire and colonialism have shaped migrations to and within Europe.

By Adrian Kane-Galbraith

On May 30, 1963, Katherine Jones, the tenant of a cheap one-room flat in London’s West End, was hauled before the Hampstead Magistrates Court on grounds that she “did unlawfully and knowingly permit [the premises] to be used for the purposes of habitual prostitution.”

By Geoffrey Turnovsky

It is no great insight to say that students today are increasingly reliant on the internet to do their reading and research for papers and projects. I measured the full scale of this trend in a 2019 class I taught on early modern French culture.

By Taylor Soja and Laurie Marhoefer

The digital revolution is changing the history profession. Vast amounts of archival materials are now digital, and digital search has both sped up and fundamentally altered many aspects of historical research.

By William Stewart

In 1913, the Austrian writer Robert Musil made an intriguing if not unsettling observation: among the mathematically inclined, there appeared to be two, diametrically opposed ideas about the relationship of mathematics to the “real world.”

By Hannah Stamler

In 1922, the Franco-Belgian journalist Clément Vautel published a dystopian story entitled Le dernier gosse (“The Last Kid”). Printed in the satirical journal Le Rire, it foretells of a 1950s France where there are no new births, save one—a miraculous “last child.”

By Jonathon Catlin

In her masterful 2002 book Evil in Modern Thought, the philosopher Susan Neiman traces an “alternative history of philosophy” from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to the September 11 terror attacks, arguing that the greatest advances in modern philosophy have been driven by the problem of evil, or ways of justifying the suffering of the innocent.

By Brandon Edwards-Schuth and John Lupinacci

As educators engage in a critique of anthropocentrism, they can develop the…

By Kay Sidebottom

The critical posthumanism of Braidotti and others differs from other strands (actor network theory, transhumanism, anti-humanism, and so on) in that it is not philosophy as such, but a “…theoretically-powered cartographical tool,” or a lens through which to read the world.

By Clarence Dodge

An environmental problem “threatens to tear Nigeria apart,” according to popular media outlets like the Telegraph (Blomfield: 2018). Local farmers in the Middle Belt region (a belt region stretching across Central Nigeria forming a transition zone between Northern and Southern Nigeria) have been engaging in armed conflict with pastoral herders migrating south from an expansive semi-arid area known as the Sahel.

By Parthiban Muniandy and Valeria Bonatti

In 2019, Sarah Lawrence faculty Parthiban Muniandy led a group of undergraduate students from Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Bard colleges on an intensive field-research study abroad trip to Malaysia.

By James Francis Cerretani

With over 80 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide at the end of 2020 (UNHCR, 2021), there is an increasing need to understand how communities living across borders are staying connected.

By Parthiban Muniandy

The Migration and Mobilities working group at Sarah Lawrence College is a core group of faculty from across the social sciences and humanities who have been variously engaged in the interdisciplinary studies of human mobility, displacement crises, migration, and other related themes.

By Joseph Woldman

An antefix discreetly rests face-down on a storage shelf in Columbia University’s Art Properties collection. The object is readily identifiable by its terminal imbrex, or cover-tile, which remains attached to the decorative roof tile.

By Monica Bulger

In the storerooms beneath Columbia University’s Avery and Fine Arts Library, some 650 Greek pottery fragments dating from the Early Bronze Age to the Classical Period are sorted into individually labeled bags in sturdy trays.

By Majdolene Dajani and Erhan Tamur

The modern discipline of Ancient Western Asian art and archaeology began as a colonial enterprise in the mid-nineteenth century. The European, American, and Ottoman expeditions in modern-day Iraq and Syria brought to light the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria.

By Mario Love

In discussing race in America, author James Baldwin suggested that “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.”

By Nancy Ruther, Sarah Rabke, and Alexa Jeffress

For over twenty years, virtual exchange (VE) has been a growing part of international higher education practice and policy, harnessing the power of increasingly user-friendly and low-cost technologies.

By Esther Cuenca

COVID-19 has been the biggest crisis that has faced the modern academy since the last economic collapse in 2008.

By Eugene Smelyansky

“It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer,” opens Giovanni Boccaccio in the prologue to The Decameron. The prologue, and especially the first chapter of Boccaccio’s mid-fourteenth-century masterpiece, are well known to anyone who studies or teaches medieval history or literature.

By Carol Anderson

An advantage to teaching a medieval and early modern Western history survey course during a worldwide pandemic is that there is a corresponding historical event that is comparable to the present situation that furnishes a useful exercise for reflection on the human condition.

By Maria Americo

The pandemic had disastrous effects on New Jersey, a state hit hard early on in the crisis. Saint Peter’s University is a small, tight-knit Jesuit university in Jersey City, the second-most diverse city in the United States, catering to a demographic of mostly students of color.

By Lucy Barnhouse

“Isn’t it ironic,” asked a student in my Spring 2020 class on the history of western medicine, “that we’re studying this now?” Other students chimed in with agreement or additional observations.

By Christina Bruno

The Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, is a network of pilgrimage routes that extends from its endpoint in northwest Spain throughout Europe. It has experienced a surge of global popularity since the late twentieth century thanks in part to movies like The Way and high profile descriptions by writers as diverse as Paulo Coelho and Shirley MacLaine.

By Bianca Lopez

As a history instructor and researcher of medieval plague outbreaks, facing a modern pandemic with students in town has been both challenging and rewarding.

By Esther Cuenca

Like many of our contributors to this pedagogy roundtable, I was caught rather flat-footed when my institution, the University of Houston-Victoria (UHV) in Victoria, Texas, announced that all classes were moving online in March 2020, just a few days after Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had caught the disease and the entire NBA season was postponed.

By Marisa Mori

Maastricht University (UM) is well-known for its Problem Based Learning (PBL) education system. Another feature that stands out in the European studies bachelor program is an elaborate skills training trajectory.

By Marie Labussière

Interdisciplinarity can be described as “a kind of sequential back-and-forth movement from one discipline to the other.” For this back-and-forth movement to take place between researchers from different disciplines, it seems to me that there are some basic prerequisites.

By Christine Neuhold

During the summer of 2020, academic staff and students alike have had to face various degrees of a COVID-19 lock-down.

By Elissaveta Radulova

Between Belgium and Germany on the most Southern border of the Netherlands is situated the historic city of Maastricht. Its citizens speak several languages by default, and the international atmosphere is a permanent feature in the numerous cozy cafés in the city-center.

By Neculai-Cristian Surubaru, Caterina Di Fazio, Miriam Urlings,Catalina Goanta, Thales Costa Bertaglia Thales, and Mathieu Segers

Along the Maas River, in the far South of the Netherlands, one can find the city of Maastricht. One of the oldest cities in the country, it has been a Roman Empire military stronghold, a cultural and religious center, and the birthplace of the current European Union (EU)

By Patrick Bijsmans

Our students tend to look into a broad range of topics, from Euroscepticism in the European Parliament, to decolonization and its impact on contemporary societies in and outside of Europe. They draw from questions regarding the development of democracy in Europe or culture in Europe’s border regions.

By Pablo del Hierro

It might be hard to believe now, but debates about the dangers of fascism or the rise of far-right political parties were not very popular just over a decade ago.

By Tricia Thrasher

So, how exactly can VR benefit language learning? Is it just another fad? How complicated is it to actually use? Many educators may find themselves asking these questions in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has forced a vast majority of traditional face-to-face language teaching to transition online.

By Megan Dixon

Even as we ask students to examine their individual environmental choices and to review broader-scale proposals for reduction of carbon emissions, it is important to help them appreciate the degree of material commitments embodied by the Capitalocene, so that they realize the full extent of the work necessary to reconceptualize the infrastructure of the future.

By Emanuel Rota

The American experience of the Age of Mass Migration in the first two decades of the twentieth century teaches us that, despite the documentable economic benefits for the host country, nativist politicians are very effective in mobilizing sectors of the local populations against newcomers.

By Estela Schindel and Timm Beichelt

When it was first founded in 1506 on the banks of the river Oder under the name “Universitas Francofurtensis,” what is now the Viadrina became the first public university of the state (then principality) of Brandenburg.

By Richard J. Golsan

Like other young academics entering their careers at that point in time, I anticipated a life of researching and teaching the beauties and subtleties of French literature and, with luck and hard work, of establishing myself one day as one of the world’s leading authorities on Montherlant, and who knew, perhaps even on modern and contemporary French theater?

By Esther Liberman Cuenca

Patrick Geary contended in The Myth of Nations (2002) that the rise of ethno-nationalism, as a response to the ascendancy of the European Union, was inseparable from the weaponization of the middle ages. Nationalism, in both its current and nineteenth-century iterations in Europe, has always paid homage to the ghosts of an imagined past, one that frequently collapses the medieval with the modern present.

By Conny Burian

Although scholars outside the humanities tend to think of European Studies as disciplines housed primarily in the political and social sciences, language and cultural studies programs make important contributions to this field.

By Kerstin Hinrichsen

For more than twenty years, students from Germany, Poland, France, Turkey, and many other countries in Europe and the world have come to Frankfurt (Oder), on the German-Polish border, to take up a unique Master’s (MA) program in European Studies.

By Nicholas Ostrum

Writing and even reading experimental literature can, in itself, be an act of creative critical analysis. In certain contexts, moreover, it can be an overt act of civic engagement, resistance, and self-realization.

By Elsa Tulmets

At the University Viadrina, the program strengthens the examination of diversity in French scientific thinking in teaching and research. In doing so, it takes into account the Viadrina’s founding mission to promote European perspectives as a German-Polish university situated at the German-Polish border.

By Kathryn Kirkpatrick

This dual vocation of academic and poet has felt both necessary and arduous: in the 1980s, reclaiming women’s writing through scholarship felt like putting literal ground under my feet.

By Alison Gulley

Despite having taught the “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” many times and to hundreds of students, from sophomores to graduate students, I left class feeling inadequately prepared to teach the work in our specific modern context.

By Martha McCaughey and Scott Welsh

In an era of melting glaciers, genocide, starvation, and species extinction, what is a scholar working at a college or university to do? Many of us feel an urgent pull to be useful, lamenting our privileged position in the ivory tower.

By Christopher Paul, Tirupapuliyar Damodaran, Noelle Wyman Roth, Laurell Malone, and Charlotte Clark

Inspired by the three-leaved plant, the Trillium conference uses a tripartite approach to sustainability that includes social, economic, and environmental elements.

By Carlos Reijnen

European Studies at the UvA has existed for well over thirty years now, and has gradually shifted from a very cultural and historical paradigm to an ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities, law, economics, and the social sciences.

By Tracey Holland

For too many years now, millions of uprooted children and young people have fallen between the cracks, unseen among the data. Not only do they face discrimination and isolation as they seek to make new lives for themselves, but many do not have access to national or local services, and are never accounted for by the various child-protection systems as they cross borders.

By Miles Rodríguez

Today, over 11 of 44 million immigrants in the US were born in Mexico, by far the largest country of origin, and Latin American immigrants as a whole makes up approximately half of the entire US immigrant population.

By Elise Shea, Camelia Suleiman, and Eva Woods Peiró

Conversations Unbound (CU) is an organization that connects college students learning languages with forcibly displaced individuals who work as online tutors. As an initiative launched by Vassar students under Professor Maria Höhn’s guidance as faculty mentor and founder of Vassar Refugee Solidarity (VRS), CU embodied VRS’s commitment to rethink existing vertical models of humanitarian engagement with displaced populations and to innovate horizontal models that allow for more democratic interactions.

By Eva Woods Peiró

For quite some time, colleagues in Education at Vassar have been trying to reimagine the classroom in an increasingly neoliberal, commercialized landscape through contemplative practices or Human Rights Education and restorative justice models.

By Stefanie Woodard

“Although people have been relocating for millennia, migration and related phenomena seem to have dominated our headlines in the last few years. Is migration happening on a larger scale today, or is this just a matter of perception?”

By Alain Duplouy and Holger A. Klein

These collections recount the parallel histories of knowledge and of scholarly traditions within two different national and academic settings.

By Mikko Tolonen

There are many crucial aspects of the digital world in current society in which humanists should be more involved, such as big data, my data, smart cities, the platform and circular economy, and the use of neural networks

By Eero Hyvönen

The digital world with its digitized resources, such as the Web with its data, services, and applications, is changing the society in fundamental ways and creating opportunities and challenges for globalization. Digitalization provides ever more new research opportunities in the humanities and social sciences, and rapidly changes ways in which research is done. These developments create a growing need for novel research and education in the emerging multidisciplinary field of Digital Humanities (DH).

By Eero Hyvönen

Data, the oil of the digital world, is typically interlinked in content, published in different formats and languages, and is distributed in different services across countries.

By Eero Hyvönen

A fundamental semantic problem in publishing and using Cultural Heritage (CH) data on the Web, is how to make the heterogeneous CH contents semantically interoperable, so that they can be searched, interlinked, and presented in a harmonized way across the boundaries of the datasets and data silos.

By Ugo Goetzl

It’s ironic that a disease that caused so much public health concern during the first half of the 20th century should have scant documentation.

By Raúl Necochea López

Now a decade into my job as a professor, I am learning that teaching is not only as important as my research, it is also personally and professionally rewarding.

By Svetlana Nikitina

High expectations and multiple feedback loops create constructive impetus for students to adjust their intervention to the needs of the community and its circumstances.

By Agata Lisiak

Bard College Berlin (BCB) is a liberal arts university located in Berlin’s district of Pankow. True to the principles of liberal arts education, BCB offers interdisciplinary programs in the humanities and social sciences, with a strong focus on the development of essential writing and thinking skills.

By Brittany Murray

Taïa could serve as a model for those who strive to balance intellectual breadth with depth.

By Jeffrey Jurgens

Since 2015, more than three million people from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia have traveled into the EU in order to seek refuge and asylum.

By Djemila Carron

InZone has been working in refugee camps for the last eight years, and in fragile contexts for over twelve years. Starting with trainings for interpreters in the field, InZone subsequently developed into a center dedicated to higher education for refugees in refugee camps in Kenya and Jordan.

By Peter Debaere

Here we sample a number of water centers and institutes. By its very nature, water almost asks for the emergence of such organizations.

By Leon F. Szeptycki and Newsha Ajami

The American West is an arid region to begin with, and climate change, population growth, and aging infrastructure are further exacerbating water scarcity in some parts of the region. Stanford University established Water in the West in 2010 to conduct research relevant to the growing water challenges in the American West and to develop solutions that will move the region toward a more sustainable water future.

By Rebecca Olson

The Pacific Institute is a global water think tank that combines science-based thought leadership with active outreach to influence local, national, and international efforts in developing sustainable water policies

By Upmanu Lall

Founded in January 2008, the Columbia Water Center (CWC) is committed to understanding and addressing both the role and scarcity of fresh water in the 21st century. The CWC was established for the purpose of studying the diminishing levels of fresh water and creating innovative sustainable and global solutions. CWC combines multidisciplinary academic research with solutions-based fieldwork to develop and test creative responses to water challenges around the world.

By Nicole Callahan

So much of what really happens in our system is that people are cowed into submission, traumatized and damaged.

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss

The evening event, held from 5-7 pm followed by a reception, will include speakers from North America and Europe working on scholarship, policy and practice related to extreme and radical right politics, movements, organizations, and subcultural youth scenes.

By Peter Debaere

The lead-poisoning of children in the wake of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, that erupted in 2015 put a spotlight on the crumbling state of U.S. water infrastructure.

By Gideon Wolfaardt 

The challenges linked to water scarcity are often exacerbated by poor water quality, and South Africa is no exception. These challenges are complex, with technological capabilities often constrained by social and economic realities.

By Joep Schyns    

Water footprints can be calculated for an individual person, a process, a product’s entire value chain, or for a business, a river basin, or a nation. They provide powerful insights for businesses to understand their water-related business risk, for governments to understand the role of water in their economy and water dependency, and for consumers to know how much water is hidden in the products they use.

By Janosch Nieden

In the heart of Europe, tradition meets innovation. In the trinational Upper Rhine region, shared by Germany, France, and Switzerland, five universities within a distance of only 200 kilometers are forming a European Campus.

By Dustin Garrick

Water is vital for human well-being, economic development and a healthy environment. Each year shocks such as floods and droughts have devastating impacts on people and economies worldwide. Ensuring access to an acceptable quantity and quality of water, and protection from water-related shocks is a defining challenge for society in the 21st century.

By Emma Meurs 

IHE Delft is the largest international graduate water education facility in the world and is based in Delft, the Netherlands. Since 1957, the Institute has provided water education and training to professionals from over 190 countries, the vast majority from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

By Mette Frimodt-Møller

A wide range of research is conducted into water at the University of Copenhagen, and collectively, it covers the whole water cycle. The research includes, for example, the interaction between soil, water, and biological production, water quality in developing countries, and modelling of how pollutants are transported via water.