Humanities Newsletter

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LEAD ARTICLE:

Welcome from the new director

A note of introduction from the new director of the UR Humanities Center

Welcome and Welcome Back, a new school year begins! I am honored and excited to step into the role of Director of the University of Richmond Humanities Center. The Center promotes humanistic methodologies and facilitates humane conversations in the university’s intellectual and cultural life. Thanks to the efforts of my predecessor, the indefatigable Dr. Nathan Snaza, the UR Humanities Center is a welcoming space committed to fostering the essential role the humanities play across the university’s five schools, its departments, and its programs.

For those who don’t know me, I’m first and foremost a 25-year member of the History Department. I specialize in the Medieval and Renaissance history of the Mediterranean, southern Italy in particular. Over the years my research and teaching interests have ranged from twelfth-century aristocratic families to premodern travel and migration, and from the works of Dante to the Crusades. (If you’ve heard rumors of a professor who has their students plan sieges of campus buildings, yup, that’s me.)

A little over a decade ago, I co-developed the ‘Humanities Initiative’. The project had a twofold mission: first, to foster community and inquiry for students interested in humanistic study and second, to elevate the visibility of the humanities on campus – showcasing the work done by both faculty and students. The Humanities Fellows Program and Humanities Connect Program were born of these two objectives. Thanks in no small part to the foundational work of past Directors Nathan Snaza and, before him, Dr. Nicole Sackley, these two missions grew into the University-wide Center and its fruitful programming collaborations.  

Forging Ahead…

With many important pieces in place, the Humanities Center is moving into a new phase– one that comes during a challenging and, frankly, unprecedented time for universities and especially for the humanities. We are in a moment when ‘making the case’ to engage in this work has never been more urgent or necessary and at the same time has never been more difficult. Aware of these challenges, we seek to explain the centrality of humanities questions, values, and research as a way to promote understanding and to offer tools for navigating an often bewildering contemporary world.

For a new Director the theme for this year’s programming, How Do We Inherit? is specially fortuitous.  I will press forward with the goals that I have inherited and that have defined the Center since its inception:

1. To advocate for the Humanities
2. To nurture Students as Researchers and Ethical World Citizens
3. To facilitate Connections across Departments, Programs and Schools
4. To support Faculty Research and Pedagogy Through Collaboration  

I am eager to build upon the Center’s efforts to incorporate career planning and training into the program – to offer an ‘applied humanities’ of sorts by linking humanistic disciplines with career development for students. I will draw on the expertise of the newly - selected American Colleges of the South Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows, Dr. Mimi Hanaoka and Dr. Olivier Delers, whose charges include integrating the humanities with Career Services.  

We are fortunate to be part of an intellectual community of teacher-scholar-friends at UR.  We have a vibrant Humanities Center and an inviting dedicated space in the Humanities Commons.  We all know there are many humanities and humanities-adjacent events on campus – talks, workshops, exhibits – a veritable feast of opportunities to enjoy humane study and performances and to build community.   The Humanities Center will continue to operate as a clearinghouse for those events, where people inside and outside the university can find out what the humanities have on offer at UR.   

If you are planning an event that intersects in some way with the Humanities, please post on this Google doc. I urge you also to reach out to me with ideas and suggestions for future programming.  

I look forward to working with all of you over this next year.  And I am confident that as we exchange ideas, share new research possibilities and sing the praise of a humanities education we will continue to fulfill the Center’s vital mission:  to promote the humanities “as a cluster of practices that shape how we perceive, make sense of and respond to an ever-changing world.”   

 - Joanna…

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LEAD ESSAY:

I want to continue the practice of inviting scholars across campus and beyond to offer a brief piece about their latest work. For the September issue of the newsletter, I reached out to friend and colleague Dr. Sydney Watts from the Department of History. Sydney has put together a short essay on migration and the question: What moves us? I hope you enjoy her insights on this topic as much as I have.

Dr. Joanna Drell
Humanities Center Director

What moves us?

For the past several years, I have been pursuing the question: “What moves us?” I mean this literally – what propels us to quit the places we call home? As I study the lives of emigrants during the French Revolution, I keep coming back to the problem of those who are forced to leave, those who are free to cross borders, and those who are criminalized for their choices. Revolutionary prints portray the characteristic émigré as a wealthy aristocrat dashing away in a gilded carriage. Dressed in silk and lace, the courtier and his carefree entourage trip lightly across the frontier with trunks full of jewels and gold coins. Their departure was a “joyous” one – as the patriots shouted, “Good riddance!” From the perspective of noble emigrants who wrote about their experiences, the dissolution of Old Regime institutions and feudal systems of privilege was irrevocable. They fled a country that had turned against them. They abandoned their homes and sacrificed their patrimony. The Revolution had destroyed what was sacred to them: the monarchy, the Church, their birthright. Communities in exile soon became centers of counterrevolution. Emigrants, such as Chateaubriand, would later publish their memoirs as melancholy Romantics, lamenting all that was lost.  

Several summers ago, with the help of the Digital Scholarship Lab and a team of undergraduates, I mapped the ten-year migration of over eight hundred French people who sailed into the small fishing town of St. Helier on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. As I pursued questions surrounding the origins of these registered “aliens,” I discovered how haphazard the emigration was for so many other French people. In addition to the flight of exiled bishops and members of defunct local parlements were the massive displacement of urban artisans, parish priests, harbor pilots, court musicians, skilled female and male workers, and hundreds of domestic servants. The small trickle of noble households in 1789-90 turned into a flood of commoners by 1792-93, overwhelming the local population of Jersey. Their arrivals came amidst foreign wars, popular insurrections, massive unemployment, and laws mandating deportation. The Channel Islands drew many emigrants who travelled alone to find work. Single mothers sought the safety of Jersey with infants and young children in tow. Couples married and raised families while separated during military missions. Roman Catholic clergy, forced into exile to avoid imprisonment in France, established parishes alongside Calvinist churches. Fear may have motivated them, but their migration schemes show the desire for continuity and stability.

What I have discovered in the archives has put a different face on the revolutionary emigration: the gendering of exiles, community coherence amidst the diaspora, and collective strategies that show safe-keeping and innovation in the face of threats. Writing about these experiences in the present anti-immigration climate with increased border control provides a much-needed perspective on this human experience. The circumstances in revolutionary France are, of course, entirely different from today. What remains constant is the human cost of regime change. The advantage of history is that we know how the story ends.

Sydney Watts

Associate Professor of History

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LEAD ESSAY:

The arts at Richmond are truly a treasure for our campus and the local community. At every turn our students are sharing their talents in an impressive recital, a thoughtful discussion on art acquisition, or fearlessly auditioning for main stage productions. Our faculty, too, delve deep into their disciplines, like my colleague Erling Sjovold who recently returned from an art fellowship in Paris, and who has co-taught the Humanities Fellows Program with me and Professor Nicole Maurantonio. That leads us to Issa Lampe and Orianna Cacchione of our University Museums who bring us this month’s lead essays in photos — with strong connections to our inheritance theme. If you haven’t been to the Harnett Museum of Art this semester or the recently re-opened Lora Robins Gallery, you’re missing the fine work of the entire Museums team.

 - Joanna

Harnett Museum Collection Spotlight

The Dixie of Our Union

Issa Lampe, executive director of University Museums, has curated a spotlight exhibition of a single work of art (ten framed drawings) by Bethany Collins called “The Dixie of Our Union.”  In the ten framed pages, Collins graphically recreates—by copying and hand-drawing—historical sheet music for eight pro- Union “Dixie” contrafacta (alternative lyrics to a familiar melody) from the early 1860s. In her transcription of Dixie’s Land no. 5, Collins has written and then expunged a racist slur, leaving a smudge of graphite: “…old Virginie’s strapping [*******] make good…diggers.” Spraying pigment at her pages like an activist in the historical archive, she evokes both past and present violence. The artist has described these inky clouds as representations of the tear gas used on protesters in Minnesota after the 2020 killing of George Floyd, noting in an interview, “Dixie becomes the thread that connects all of our past to now—2020 didn’t come out of nowhere.” This piece, now a part of UR’s permanent collection, exemplifies a cultural artifact that that can be linked to the current Humanities Center theme of ‘inheritance’.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW

Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn

Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History as part of the 2025-26 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts. In this exhibition, Smith directs her focus on reimagining the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  Smith references monuments through two different registers—empty plinths and executive orders—to critically reconsider how we, as a country, commemorate our history. The exhibition uses both immersive video installation, and a related set of drawings to shift the focus of Reconstruction from the rebuilding of the former Confederate states to the indispensable contributions African Americans made to the reformation of American culture and politics.  

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois’s 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn in which he grapples with the construction of race and the psycho-political condition of African Americans, ultimately demanding a refusal of internalized racist logics. Positing Richmond as a nexus of the American psyche, this exhibition reflects on the ghosts of the Confederacy that continue to haunt contemporary society and asks what a more perfect union might look like.  

The exhibition is curated by Orianna Cacchione, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions.

Images courtesy of the Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums.
Photography by Meg Eastman. Artwork © Cauleen Smith.

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LEAD ESSAY

Our UR colleague Alexander Englert was recently published in The Conversation, discussing Kant’s rules for virtuous thinking. This led me to contacting Alexander for our lead essay this month, where he invites us to change our worldview — a fantastic read!

- Joanna

You Must Change Your Worldview

The concept, worldview, fascinates me. It denotes, on the one hand, something unattainable. For we never have the world totally in view. On the other hand, the world is always close at hand in thought. After all, where else is the world except in the way someone thinks about it?

In my research, I wrestle with this concept, its origin, and its use in thinkers from the German-speaking tradition, especially Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel. Indeed, Kant is to thank not only for first articulating the concept, but furthermore coining the word, which eventually travelled through translation into the English language as “worldview.” In his 1790 work, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant uses Weltanschauung for the first time to denote a special sort of intuition responsible for our capacity to apprehend nature as a unified whole despite its disparate vastness. He argued that, if operating only with select experiences in isolation, nothing could account for continuities and regularities in nature, given how experience always changes.

It was then in 1893, when the theologian James Orr recognized the potency of this concept and translated it for the first time into English as, “world-view,” since he couldn’t identify any available translation of Weltanschauung or its close cognates (like Weltanicht and Weltbeobachtung). The rest is history (literally). But it was the philosophical notion intended by Kant and the subsequent European thinkers, which Orr wanted to transmit to Anglophone audiences, a meaning that has arguably been lost.

My research explores this original concept and how it might relate to everyday, humdrum existence. In contrast to many contemporary uses, it is not a given state of beliefs, but rather a task that life calls each of us (Kant thought) to undertake. And this task is to find a harmony between our beliefs, such that they do not merely occupy mental space side-by-side, as it were, but rather mutually support each other. Just as the building materials of a house fit together to create a stable abode, so too, Kant thought, it is up to us to construct the world out of experience’s building blocks.

While still focused on German Idealism, my research has expanded to include other thinkers who saw worldview formation as an essential task. While at the Institute for Advanced Study, I stumbled down a rabbit hole and discovered that the Austrian logician and mathematician, Kurt Gödel, also sought a harmonious worldview: to wit, influenced greatly by Kant and the German Idealist tradition. Recently, I have been unpacking his worldview, which he referred to as a “theological” one, including concepts like God, personal immortality, and more.

What I enjoy is these thinkers’ active, relentless seeking. Rather than passively going through the motions, they exhibit a persistent consideration of how one’s thoughts hang together (or don’t). They encourage epistemic humility and enjoin us to test our views. For as learning never stops, we are set before a lifelong task.

Even when I think I might have figured something out, I hear a voice say: “You must change your worldview.”

Alexander T. Englert
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

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LEAD ESSAY

I’m delighted that my colleague Graeme Mack from the Department of History is bringing us the lead essay this month. Graeme is doing a phenomenal job organizing programming around our new Humanities Center initiative, Forging A New Nation, which aims to facilitate discussions between UR faculty, staff, and students about the many applications of the Declaration of Independence throughout American history and about their relevance to our present moment. And what better way to start the 250th than with some of his thoughts and insights.

- Joanna

Why Does the Declaration of Independence Still Matter 250 Years Later?

 What has long fascinated me about the Declaration of Independence is its soaring rhetoric. Its claims that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “certain inalienable rights” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were nothing short of revolutionary. So, too, were its claims that communities created governments to secure these rights, and that if governments failed to secure these rights, communities could rightfully “alter or abolish” them.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the declaration is that it included a paragraph espousing universal rights in the first place, when it didn’t have to. The declaration’s main objective was political independence from Great Britain. Independence would enable the newly formed “United States of America,” as it was first coined in the declaration, to potentially secure financial and military aid from European powers in its fight against Britain.

That the Second Continental Congress agreed to also include a statement on universal rights and human equality is significant. I think its inclusion is the main reason why the declaration has had such lasting power in the American psyche. Since then, generations of Americans have routinely drawn on the declaration for moral clarity and guidance and to establish political legitimacy for their own ideas, as I recently wrote in a  a piece for The Conversation.

Abraham Lincoln’s use of the Declaration of Independence during his 1858 race against Stephen Douglas for U.S. Senate is one of my favorite examples of this tendency. After Douglas argued that the declaration’s promises were limited to white Americans only, Lincoln denounced the claim. “If you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights,” Lincoln countered, “Let me entreat you to come back to the truths in the Declaration of Independence…to these sacred principles.” For Lincoln, the authors of the Declaration “meant to set up standard maxim for free men which should be…constantly looked to, constantly labored for,” an axiom that might inspire future Americans to pursue greater human equality and political rights.

The declaration has become central to how most Americans today understand their rights and freedoms. It is itself revealing that Americans routinely confuse the declaration’s language (including the national creed that “all men are created equal”) with that of the Constitution. But the declaration has not always been held in as high of regard as the Constitution. It was only through the crucible of the Civil War and the country’s struggles over emancipation and Reconstruction that the declaration was elevated and its promises of rights and equality began to transform the Constitution with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

Dr. Graeme Mack

Visiting Assistant Professor of History

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NEWSLETTER LEAD ESSAY IN Q&A

AI is a hot topic everywhere you turn it seems — the news, conversations with friends, and even here on campus. Our colleague Lauren Tilton spends a lot of time and research energy on this topic herself. She and Taylor Arnold were recently awarded a grant to develop AI tools for TV and film research. Lauren graciously agreed to answer a few pressing questions on the intersection of AI and the humanities — our lead essay this month.

- Joanna

An AI-Humanities Q&A with Dr. Lauren Tilton

Question: How do you respond to your UR colleagues who think AI is going to kill the Humanities?  

Lauren Tilton: I don’t think AI is going to kill the humanities. Much depends, though, on how we define them. If the humanities are defined primarily by skills like reading and writing, then yes, AI poses a real threat. But the humanities don’t have a monopoly on those skills. If we understand the humanities as something deeper, we need them more than ever. That deeper something includes critical thinking oriented around meaning-making, engaging with art and literature, developing imaginative possibilities, learning to think historically, and grappling with fundamental questions like who we are, where we’ve come from, and why we exist. In fact, I think the humanities are needed more than ever. It’s also why the NEH started the AI center initiative, which was the initiative seed for CLAAI. And I’m not alone in thinking this. The President of Anthropic recently said that "studying the humanities will be more important than ever".

Q: What excites you the most about AI?

LT: I am currently excited about generative AI’s potential as a tool to think with. It has surfaced unexpected ideas and ways of thinking that has pushed my own thinking in new directions. It is also dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for coding, which is particularly exciting for fields like digital humanities. That said, AI is not a replacement for being able to generate our own questions and ideas. It is more of a guide and synthesizer. And as we know, the better the prompt, the better the results, which often requires domain knowledge. Fully harnessing generative AI requires foundational knowledge and area expertise. (This was one of the major takeaways from MIT economist David Autor’s Sharp Series talk on AI and the Future of Work, and he made the point far more eloquently than I can.) What also excites me is that these tools have real limits. As an educator and researcher interested in technology both as an object of study and as a tool, I find it a fascinating challenge to figure out where those limits are, how to update my teaching accordingly and push them through our research, and how the humanities and related fields can offer insights into AI itself.

Q: Should AI Literacy be part of General Education for UR students and why?

LT: Whether AI literacy should be part of general education is ultimately a question for the faculty to decide through governance, and figuring out where it fits in the curriculum will take significant deliberation. That said, the reality is that students are going to be expected to understand and engage with these technologies beyond UR. While I am generally hesitant to turn education into a skills checklist or to chase the latest fad, I don’t think generative AI is going anywhere. And liberal arts trained students are exactly the kinds of people we want working with these technologies. They bring not just knowledge but a critical lens, which matters as AI gets implemented across so many different domains. So while a general education requirement may not be the right fit, there is a real payoff to integrating these technologies into our courses. This includes offering workshops, boot camps, and other opportunities that provide all of us both the practical skills and the critical framework to understand the possibilities and limits of tools that are shaping every aspect of our lives.

Q: A big concern among my humanities colleagues is how AI is affecting the teaching of writing.  What is your response to this concern?  Do you address the issue in your classes?

LT: Writing is one form of knowledge and communication, but it is not the only one. There is also visual, sound, embodied, and more. The privileging of writing is a choice we have made, not an inevitability. Perhaps this moment is an opportunity for liberal arts education to think more expansively about ways of knowing and being in the world that go beyond writing.We also know from inclusive pedagogies and universal design that other ways of knowing make space for the many ways people process, learn, create, and communicate.  In my courses, students create comics, data, exhibitions, memes, social media campaigns, songs,  video essays, visualizations and give presentations.  I am not saying we should stop teaching writing or that it isn’t important. But maybe this is a moment to ask whether we have overprivileged writing and logocentrism. If so, this isn’t the end of writing or a loss. It is an opening to think more multi-modally about human creativity and to expand how create knowledge.