“We all spend so much of our days “in our heads” with thoughts of work, fascinating projects, and the world around us.  Often, when I get into the sanctuary that is my own car, I am able to release some of the pressure of the day by tuning into music that awakens my inner Katy Perry, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Queen Elsa, ___________________(you fill in the blank)  and lyrics that transport me to someplace other than here.  I am in awe of the creativity and amazing talent of others on this human journey.  And the best part is, performing in my own little Honda bubble is so much FUN!  You should give yourself permission to be “that crazy person” in the next car over (you’ll only be seen for a fleeting moment at the stop light!)

I encourage you join me and to immerse yourself in something otherworldly, if only for a song or two!”

-Jo-Ann Waide, Program Assistant for UCHI

 

“You should… sample widely.  More on this in a second, but if I have to foreground a single recommendation it’s this: the new Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009). In some of the tightest, most compelling storytelling I’ve ever seen on film, this series asks profound questions about belief, belonging, sentience, servitude, family, survival, politics, power, responsibility, and war.  It explores an epochal confrontation between humankind and the increasingly sentient AI creatures of its own making.  It’s The Odyssey of our time crossed with Paradise Lost. It asks what is civilization, why does it matter, and what are its costs.

 

The “Humanities Lived” project is testament to the virtues of sampling, but to me this is an ethic. In this spirit here is a list: The Tales of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo (a so-called “children’s” book); The Epic of Gilgamesh, an early story about how knowledge and narrative are connected; Claude Lelouch’s La Bonne Année, a romp of a heist film, but among the more thoughtful feminist movies to have been made in the 1970s; Hugh Anderson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (this book covers the practicalities and ethics of a subject we should all understand better); Martin Grey’s For Those I Loved, an astonishing autobiography about endurance, love, and the Holocaust; Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a haunting reconsideration of Greek Mythology; and given the times in which we live, the United States Constitution.”

-Jennifer Terni,

Associate Head, Department of Literatures, Culture and Languages,
Associate Professor, French

 

“I confess I have procrastinated with this assignment, though I was excited and honored to be asked. I’ve felt squeamish sharing what you “should” listen to or look at or read. I realized my reaction comes from two places. First, I typically seek recommendations rather than give them. Second, as someone with a doctorate in Counseling and Human Development, “should” statements are generally things to be avoided. So, I’d like to offer a twist on this assignment; rather than recommending “what” you should choose to bring the Humanities into your life, I’d like to suggest “how” you should do it.

 

First – multitask. I listened to three soundtracks – Immortal Beloved, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Last of the Mohicans – while studying for comprehensive examinations and writing my dissertation. I could feel myself coming up for air sometimes and I’d relax into familiar melodies and percussions, breathe deeply, and dive back down into work. I read multiple books at the same time because I like the juxtaposition and can pick what I read based on my mood.

 

Second – connect with the past. History is about context and the human condition. As a history major I learned you must seek differing perspectives. I’m currently reading my second book about the history of my new hometown because place and belonging are important to me. I also love to re-read books. Beyond the cozy feeling of reconnecting with old friends, I learn how I’ve changed since the last time I read the book.

 

Third – connect with others. My favorite time of day is reading to my son at night. We are reading all of the Harry Potter books as a family. We take turns reading them aloud (we’re on Order of the Phoenix, a favorite!). We ask him how the characters feel, what words mean, and we talk about good and evil, light and dark, and the importance of magic and believing in it. We want him to be a good reader and have a good vocabulary and all those parental things. But mostly we want him to learn about himself through empathizing with others. It’s perhaps the most important thing we can teach him right now given the current state of our world.

 

My honors student self wouldn’t be fully satisfied, though, if I didn’t actually answer the question. So here you go: If it’s music – try Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas or Ralph Vaughn Williams for relaxation; Beethoven for studying and concentration; Foo Fighters or Silversun Pickups to rock out. Art? Art is what you like; go outside and find beauty in simple things. Literature – Jane Austen is always the answer. I have a mug on my desk emblazoned with Mrs. Darcy and a tiny book entitled “What Would Jane Austen Do?” Both are quite useful at work. Whatever you do, find time to engage, connect, and feed your soul with the Humanities. That’s a “should” I feel quite comfortable telling you.”

– Jennifer Lease Butts,
Assistant Vice Provost,
Enrichment Programs and Director, Honors Program

 

“People should read, or re-read, Henry Beston’s 1928 classic, The Outermost House. Set among the dunes of outer Cape Cod, Beston’s essay traces a year of changing seasons, visiting coastal species, and mild reflections on modern life. Since its publication, the book has emerged as a principle contribution to the canon of American nature writing.
With Americans at each others throats, and vandals disassembling the pillars of American civilization for their own private gains, why should anyone read this ninety-year-old book?

Well, I see a few reasons. First and foremost, its beautifully written, and we need beauty now more than ever. Beston was born to a French Canadian mother and Irish father who met, married, and settled down in the US. He grew up fluent in both French and English, and after volunteering to fight in World War I, spent a few years kicking around France and teaching at the Sorbonne. During that time, Beston began developing a writing style that wove into his prose the cadences and tonalities of verse. When applied to the rhythms of surf, sand, sea, and sky, his style musically brings out the cyclicality and beauty of non-human life.

Which raises the second reason people should read it. If ever there was a time when we need to step out of the chaos of human concerns, this is it. Contemporary nature writing has a reputation—earned or not—for self-indulgence. In the worst instances, the non-human world provides merely a foil for authors’ lyrical flourishes and introspections that, frankly, I can’t stand. Beston has none of that. His focus is the world around him, not thoughts within him. His relationship to his coastal environs emerges clearly in his writing, to be sure. But he is most concerned with the natural cycles that humans don’t follow, the environmental changes we rarely see, and the calmness that living according to those clocks brings.
Indeed, in re-reading this book this term, I found that Beston removed the noise of modern life. In it’s place, he highlighted the sounds that keep us connected to the real world. He reminded me that American-ness is more defined through our relationship to our non-human world, than through the inanities of day to day distractions, diversions, and diatribes. From the cacophony he brought out the symphony—and it’s a sound we all could use more of.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CNTTEV2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

http://www.henrybeston.com/outermost.html

-Matthew McKenzie
Associate Professor, History, American Studies, and Maritime Studies

“You must read The Adivasi Will Not Dance, a collection of ten short stories by Hansda Sowendra Shekhar, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, 2015 (The National India Academy of Letters Award, 2015). Shekhar collected stories of Santhal tribes (scheduled tribes of India are pre-nation state indigenous communities) while working as a medical officer in a remote part of the Jharkhand state, a newly formed state in India with large Santhal population. Each story reveals the territorial interstices of Santhali life in India. The third story November is the Month of Migrations is a brutal, raw, and harsh description of how Talami (a young Santhal girl) had to exchange sexual favors with a police officer in return of two cold breads and Rs 50.00 (90 cents). Santhali community members called the story pornographic and burnt effigies of Sowendra Shekhar. In response to the protests, the Jharkhand government has banned the book. As I sat in the early September warm breeze in my Storrs-Masfield backyard and leafed through the bright turquoise blue covers, Sowendra’s writing transposed me into the forests of West-Bengal and Jharkhand (where I grew up & often traveled on winter vacations to the Santhal areas). The stories narrate struggles of Mangla Murmu the troupe-master of a performing group who would not dance for the President of India and is brutally beaten down on the ground, while another one narrates the story of Bikram-Kumang who is asked to hide his Santhali roots by his Hindu upper-caste landlord. The book will take you on a journey of indigenous communities in India, and reveals how generations of Indian tribes live with the ravages of colonization.”

-Debanuj Dasgupta,
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

“You Should…Confront Racism in the Digital Realm”

 

A teach-in moderated by Professor Anke Finger and featuring Professors Kelly Dennis, Anne Mae Duane, Bhakti Shringarpure and Ph.D. candidate Matt Guariglia.

 

The “You Should…” pulls from a new program UCHI started to make the humanities more personal and urgent (http://humanities.uconn.edu/humanities-lived-you-should/) and “Confront Racism” is the theme of the Metanoia this year.

 

Join us for a dialogue about social media activism/racism (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and online racism, online activism and connections to civil responsibility, courage, and action— basically the potential and pitfalls, in other words, of our life online. How does one recognize and take action against racism online? Are there tools or methods that have been effective? Can we use social media for cultural change?

 

Nov 8, noon – 2pm, UCHI Conference Room

 

For more on UConn’s 2017 Metanoia see: (http://together.uconn.edu/)

 

 

        Race and gender disparities. Factional hostility breaking out into violence. Struggles for adequate health care. The right to vote. Although these phrases seem “ripped from the headlines” today, in fact they represent conditions in the US a century and a half ago in which women in nursing found themselves struggling for self-representation with implications for just pension laws, racial equity, and voting rights. The book you must read in order to understand how writing and publishing media were put to use in these social and political struggles is Jane E. Schultz’s 2004 book Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America. A professor of English at Indiana University and a fellow and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, Schultz turns the skills of archival historical research to understand how some of the over 20,000 Union women served in military hospitals during the Civil War. She examines the nurse narratives published during the war and in the decades afterward (several published by Hartford subscription publishing houses), analyzing the reach of these publications. By moving the domestic practice of nursing outside their homes and caring for the bodies of strangers, wartime nurses were breaking new social and professional ground for women. Within a decade of war, professional nursing education would be established in the US. It would take another three decades after the war for women’s wartime nursing service to be recognized by a federal pension act. Schultz documents, however, racial and class disparities: White middle-class women were routinely classified as “nurses” while Black and poor White women were categorized as “cooks” and “laundresses” (even though they often performed the same tasks), with disparate pensions. Because Union nurses risked their health and lives in service to the country, they also implicitly dismantled a persistent argument against woman suffrage, i.e., that only men should vote because only men could defend the nation. It would take people like Civil War health care organizer Mary Livermore to make this argument explicitly on behalf of women’s right to vote in her book My Story of the War and periodical articles.

 

Thomas Lawrence Long is associate professor in residence in the School of Nursing, serving on the core faculty of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. He is the curator of the School of Nursing’s Josephine Dolan Collection of Nursing History.

 

 

Links: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807858196/women-at-the-front/

 

I’m almost always more comfortable laying down the law on what you should NOT be doing so I’m glad to dig deep and find my inner positivity. The should-LISTEN these days is the Politically Re-active podcast series with comedians W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu. They talk to writers, professors and activists and its all a way to make sense of and try to laugh a little at our horrendous political climate. My recent favorite was the one in which bell hooks talks about DACA, current protest culture, problems with mainstream feminism, her sex life and so much more, she’s always challenging, relevant and brilliant. In terms of reading, I’m a huge fan of queer theorist Jasbir Puar and I just read an excerpt from her upcoming book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. It was eye-opening because one of the issues that Puar addresses is how radical resistance movements are still pretty ableist even though there has come about a simultaneous “spectacle of disability empowerment.” I can’t wait to get my hands on the entire book. Pre-order it now, its going to become a should-READ! 

At the risk of gross self-promotion, I would recommend my book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016). When I researched and wrote the book over a period of ten years, I could hardly have anticipated how much it spoke to contemporary issues. The book, which expands the chronology of abolition from the classical pre-Civil War period back to the colonial era, reimagines abolition as a radical, interracial movement in which the enslaved themselves played a central role. It argues that abolition was one of the first social movements to systematically develop the concept of human rights at a time when slaveholders and their allies dominated the American state. Many current activists against mass incarceration, for immigrant rights and the sanctuary movement, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street can learn from the diverse tactics and ideologies espoused by abolitionists since their concerns were first articulated by them. The book shows how abolitionists developed transnational networks of protest and overlapped with contemporary radical movements such as women’s rights, pacifism, utopian socialism, the rights of labor, immigrants, and Native Americans. They, especially the more radical Garrisonian wing of the movement, also presciently fought against capital punishment and the criminalization of blackness.

 

To learn more listen:

 

Interview, The Diane Rehm Show, NPR,  http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-03-24/manisha-sinha-the-slaves-cause-a-history-of-abolition

 

Interview in Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, Episode 142, Manisha Sinha, A History of Abolition, https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/episode-142-manisha-sinha-a-history-of-abolition/

 

Interview with Sam Seder, The Majority Report, http://majority.fm/2016/04/27/manisha-sinha-the-slaves-cause-a-history-of-abolition/

 

Interview, The Marc Steiner Show,  http://www.steinershow.org/podcasts/racism/the-slaves-cause-a-history-of-abolition/

Holiday was created in 1946 for “a world in which recreation will be more important to everyone than ever before – more important in this busier world of new stresses and strains because more and more doctors are prescribing escape, and travel, and fun.”  For three decades, the travel magazine promoted the advice of neurologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, “The sun, the open air, silence, and art are great physicians.”  I suffer from the anxiety, fatigue, rampant skepticism, and extreme boredom that plagues the unlucky, middling members of the generation called “X”.  On the advice of my doctor, I considered a Holiday.  Over the summer, I squeezed in a trip with James Michener to Japan, saw the Great Barrier Reef in Australia with Arthur C. Clarke, and I was escorted to Norway by Robert Capa.  Henri Cartier-Bresson has been tagging along and promised to share his snapshots with me for my photo album.  Over drinks, John Steinbech and I have been considering the value of an American tourist.  I’ve also been taking practical advice about what and how to pack from fashionable women, who actually travel, from Italy, France, Spain and Scotland.  Because I’ve been on the go so much, I’ve decided my next trip will be a staycation, New Hampshire with John Cheever.  I just don’t know when I’ll find the time to buy a new pair of inlaid shorty boots for my trip with Debs Myers to that Colorado dude ranch.  The good news is I’m dutifully following my doctor’s advice, taking my medicine and feeling better all the time.  You might do the same.

 

http://www.holiday-magazine.com/

Holiday.  Philadelphia, Pa.: Curtis Pub. Co., 1946-1977 (ISSN0018-3520)