“Engaged Humanities: Notes on a Movement” is the title of an interactive lecture that will take place at 3 p.m. today (Tuesday, Feb. 11) in the Spiva Library Quiet Room (Room 413).
Mark Canuel, professor of English and the director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will be the featured speaker.
According to Canuel, the concept of “engaged humanities” has recently dominated discussions of how to save the humanities in our current cultural movement. His presentation surveys examples of engaged projects in the humanities, which connects humanities research with real-world issues – and also locates problems in some current ways of thinking about the value of such projects, and proposes that we consider a new, more critical view of engagement: a view that places renewed emphasis on the historical, theoretical and contextual work that has occupied the humanities for hundreds of years.
Light refreshments will be served at the event.