Humanist Methods Reading Group Meeting

This is the first meeting of the Humanist Methods Reading Group; the group will meet monthly at a time determined at the first meeting. This is an informal event, so if folks need to drop in/out to make it fit their schedule, they can! Contact Nic Helms with questions.

Join Associate Professor of British Literature and Chair of English, Dr. Nic Helms, in a reading group focused on Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason. In Humanist Reason, Hayot describes the long war against humanist disciplines, back to its roots in the 1800s, and makes both a highly theory-laden and an utterly practical pitch for how to help the humanities thrive in our current institutions, by emphasizing the long-standing and ongoing interdisciplinary applications of humanist methods of critical reading, analytical writing, and human-scale storytelling. Hayot’s pitch from the LA Review of Books aptly synthesizes his purpose for Humanist Reason and the need for applying humanist methods across disciplines: “There could and should be humanist thinking in every field, about every kind of object; there should be biologists who tell the story of a single cell, physicists who tell the story of a single atom, and historians of rivers and of continental drift.” 

We welcome faculty and staff from all disciplines who are interested in the power and potential of humanist methods, whether or not they identify as humanists themselves!