The Talking Humanities Project consist in a series of interviews sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities (CfAH) with faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette. The purpose of the Talking Humanities Project is to clarify the role of the humanities along the social and the natural sciences in responding to a world convulsed by social injustice and existential threats posed to humanity by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. At CfAH, we hope that these conversations will help discern the importance of a Jesuit, humanistic education in the formation of professionals facing a complex and demanding world.
For the first Talking Humanities Project installment, the CfAH Graduate Assistant, Jorge Montiel, interviewed Dr. Heidi Bostic, who serves as the Dean of the Helen Way Kingler College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Education. The interview took place on November 2, 2021 via Microsoft Teams.
鈥淭he Humanities are the disciplines that ask different kinds of questions. We could even be so bold as to call them 鈥榖igger questions.鈥� But they are bigger questions in part because they ask who we are and how ought we to live with one another, with our planet, and with the broader global context. And they are the kinds of questions that, when you ask them, something resonates in your being, and at the same time, you realize that you never fully answer these questions. These are perennial and even lifelong questions.鈥� 鈥揇r. Heidi Bostic
The second installment of the Talking Humanities Project featured CfAH Graduate Assistant Jorge Montiel interviewing Dr. Laura Matthew. Dr. Matthew is an Associate Professor of History here at Marquette, as well as the Director of the Latin American Studies program.
"The humanities is really comfortable with things being complex and asking very complex questions, so we're using very quantitative and qualitative methods, but we're looking for meanings... looking for different ways that might not approach and look at the same problem, admitting into the conversation and into our analysis the possibility that the tools we might use in one discipline or in just our own positionality, our own perspective, our own training, our own experience as human beings, might be limiting our ability to fully comprehend something that we're trying to analyze." -Dr. Laura Matthew
The third installment of the Talking Humanities Project featured CfAH Graduate Assistant Jorge Montiel interviewing Dr. Tara Daly, an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures department, and Dr. Stephanie Rivera Berruz, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy.
"No matter what discipline you are working in, in what college you situate yourself as a either a student, staff, or professor, this question of "What is human?" is something of interest to all of us." -Dr. Tara Daly
"The question of the human is a fundamentally shared question... regardless of whether you're interested in technologies of science, if you're interested in math, whatever your interests might be, even if they might not be considered in the humanities, we do share a common experience of being a human." -Dr. Stephanie Rivera Berruz
