Professional and academic activities
Brian Green, Sociology, give an invited talk at the Second International Seminar on Human Rights Education in Casta Papiernicka, Slovakia on March 23. The seminar, organized by the Slovak Center for Communication and Development, focused on training young educators and other professionals for human rights education. The title of the talk was “Teaching Democracy and Human Rights in a Globalized Era.” It focused on advancing our conceptualization of both democracy and human rights in a changing world, and on strategies for teaching these ideas in classrooms in more developed countries like the United States and European countries.
On April 10, Center for Writing tutors Josh Starkey, Allison Siwacki, Karah Dunn, Kate Curtis, and Administrative Assistant Jahleh Ghanbari presented “Close Knit or Closed Off?: How Writing Centers Project Images of Inclusion and Exclusion” at the Northeast Writing Center Association’s annual conference at Boston University. Their presentation included an analysis of data from different constituencies on campus in order to understand how writing centers are perceived by faculty, students, and administration.
Mark C. Long, professor of English and American Studies, has received a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant is designed to support the development of humanities courses organized around questions to which no discipline or field or profession can lay an exclusive claim—questions that predate the formation of the academic disciplines themselves. Mark’s proposed course, “What is Nature?” will trace the history of experiences and concepts of nature from the ancient world to the age of Darwin. Students will read a sequence of major texts from the Western tradition alongside supplemental treatises and excerpts from religious and scientific documents to help students understand the broad contours of thinking about the natural world in the Western cultures of Europe as well as the Eastern cultures of China and India, and the Arab-World and Africa.
