Kingfisher 2005 by College of Humanities

The

Kingfisher

P U B L I C AT I O N

COL L E G E T H E

O F

2005

O F T H E

H U MA N I T I E S

U N I V E R S I T Y

O F

U TA H

Transformation, calm, multiplicity, unity, felicity, disturbance, revelation... To poets, the kingfisher magically embodies all of these—a joining of opposites, a preservation of variety, an embrace of challenge and change. “What does not change is the will to change,” begins Charles Olson’s poem “The Kingfisher.” In Greek mythology, the kingfisher paradoxically is associated both with transformation—the story of Alcyon and Ceyx whom, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Zeus turned into a pair of birds—and with the idea of “halcyon days”—a period of calm seas and of general peace and serenity. In Gerald Manley Hopkins sonnet, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” the iridescent plumage of this spectacular bird is celebrated as an image of both the multiplicity and unity of God’s creation. And in Amy Clampitt’s poem, which bears the same title as Charles Olson’s, “a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color/of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow/through landscapes of untended memory.” The College of Humanities extends this poetic tradition by adopting the kingfisher as a symbol of these fundamental concepts that we in the Humanities practice and teach. We believe in their profound and lasting importance. We are pleased to offer you this 2005 issue of the Kingfisher, and thank you for the role you play in promoting our mission of lifelong learning.

The College of Humanities would like to warmly thank one of our generous alumni, Richard H. Keller M.D., for sponsoring this year’s edition of The Kingfisher.

 College of Humanities | The University of Utah 255 S. Central Campus Drive | 2100 LNCO | Salt Lake City, UT 84112 801.581-6214 | fax 801.585.5190

Robert Newman Dean

2 3 4

DEPARTMENTS, CENTERS, NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY INITIATIVES THE COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES AT A GLANCE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION Dirty Little Words

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH The Aims of Literary Representation: Two Perspectives

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Narratives of the Past

DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE Hideous Progeny and Other Tales of The Humanities

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS Utah English

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

The

K i ng fi sher

2 005

table of contents

Understanding Science and Ecology

MIDDLE EAST CENTER Overheard...

TANNER HUMANITIES CENTER Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity

ASIAN STUDIES PROGRAM, INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PROGRAM, LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM Area Studies

UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM Property and Propriety: Adam Smith as Rhetorician and Economist

VANISHING VOICES Language Preservation with the Center for American Indian Languages

26 28 30 32

REACHING OUT TO THE COMMUNITY

37 38 40 42

FROM ECUADOR TO THE EMMYS

VINCENT PECORA: THE INAUGURAL GORDON B. HINCKLEY PROFESSOR THE ECOLOGY OF RESIDENCY THE HUMAN TOUCH Revitalizing the College of Humanities POETRY STUDENT SCHOLARSHIPS CONVOCATION May 6, 2005

DEPARTMENTS Communication English History Languages & Literature Linguistics Philosophy

CENTERS & PROGRAMS Center for American Indian Languages International Studies Program Middle East Center Tanner Humanities Center University Writing Program & Center

NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY INITIATIVES Masters Degrees Environmental Humanities Asian Studies*

THE COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES AT A GLANCE The College of Humanities is the second-largest college on campus and is at the core of the University of Utah’s mission and the experience of higher education. The Humanities offer of an approach to a conscience in a complex world. Professors study and teach essential skills and tools for thinking and communicating that apply readily to everyday practical situations, emphasizing a commitment to community, and awareness of our integral function in a multifaceted global culture. Through research and pedagogy that illustrate healthy questioning and shifting frontiers, and attempts at inclusion and connection, we offer approaches that are fundamentally democratic. We thereby help to produce better-informed, thoughtful world citizens with a foundation for nuance and flexibility. All undergraduates enroll in Humanities courses at some point in their academic pursuits. Each year, about 2500 of these students choose to focus their studies on Humanities, choosing from the College’s 21 majors. The College confers onefifth of the University’s diplomas annually. Graduate students number about 400 and have matriculated into one of 14 Master’s and 13 Ph.D. programs. The College’s 170 tenured and tenure-track faculty have published 60 books and more than 300 articles in the past three years; possess international distinction as scholars; are the most frequent winners of University teaching and research awards; and are the most diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender in the University.

—

Minors Animation Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Latin American Studies Applied Ethics

—

Centers & Programs Applied Ethics Program Documentary Studies Program * An evolving program that is pending University approval

n accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.” -Henry D. Thoreau, “Reading,” Walden, 1854.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION The Department of Communication continues its long tradition of supporting a community of scholars who are committed to academic excellence, intellectual innovation, and cultural change. Blending theory and research from both mass and speech communication, the Department offers students the opportunity to explore issues like environmental communication, media values and ethics, science and technical literacy, and critical cultural studies from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective.

NEW FACULTY The Department of Communication welcomes three new faculty members this year:

Dan Emery joins us from Drake University and brings to the department a new perspective on classical rhetoric. Dan will also be teaching in the University Writing Program.

—

Danielle Endress has just completed her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on Native American discourse and social movements, especially those movements implicated in environmental issues.

—

Ron Yaros has just completed his Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin. His goal is to create a center for science literacy here at the University of Utah. He is already working on an NSF grant to help accomplish that goal.

OF INTEREST… Craig Denton, Professor in the Department of Communication, will serve as the first director of The Center for Documentary Studies, a new interdisciplinary program.

—

With more than 1700 undergraduate students, Communication remains the largest major on campus.

—

Professors Karen Ashcraft, George Cheney, and Sally Planalp have received national recognition for their most recent scholarly book-length publications.

Dirty Little Words

In a series of focus groups attended by people who communicate about natural resources for a living, I learned some dirty little words: environmentalist, environmentalism, and environment. The participants said they avoid using these“dirty words” like the proverbial plague and preferred euphemisms: a “conservationist” or a “passionate person” to denote an “environmentalist,” and “open space” or “viewshed” instead of “environment.” These people had devoted their working lives to protecting the stuff of the earth, yet the e-words were bad, too emotional. What a communicative trick has been played upon us! The dictionary finds the word “environmentalist” benign – a person who takes action to protect the environment, which could just as easily mean turning off lights as chaining yourself to a tree. But according to some, environmentalists have displaced communists as the devil incarnate. They lurk at the deep end of the ideological spectrum, restricting “freedom” and harming people and their livelihoods. What can we do when popular culture, politics, and public relations spin a perfectly good word out of control? Cooptation is nothing new; marketers realized in the 1970s that there was green to be made by associating with green. The word “feminist” also has been spun in the public sphere; my students tell me they visualize a women who’s loud, dowdy, hairy, and angry. The way to combat spin is not to succumb to it, to abandon ship and find a new word, as some have suggested – it’s to come out of the e-word closet and claim it, protect it. Perhaps we could borrow the strategy used by a recent women’s march on Washington and wear T-shirts proclaiming,“This is What an Environmentalist Looks Like.” I will not forsake this dirty little word – precisely because of the emotional burden it carries. Owning the emotion is harnessing its power and addressing head-on what its disparagement conceals – the fear, the greed, the separation. Treating the earth with humility doesn’t mean sacrifice, it means fullness. Valuing a stream or loving a forest or treasuring clean air doesn’t make us poor, but rich. Connecting with what we have made separate and distant gives us strength, not weakness. Using the e-words without shame communicates respect, compassion, and love for all that is not human. For in the words of author Kirkpatrick Sale, “In its attitude to the land, and the creatures thereof, a culture reveals the truest part of its soul.” Julia Corbett, Associate Professor of Communication

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH NEW FACULTY

The Department welcomes Vincent Pecora, the Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and Culture. Professor Pecora joins our faculty from UCLA, where he has taught since 1985. He is the author of numerous articles and three books, including Households of the Soul (1977) and Self and Form in Modern Narrative (1989). While at UCLA Professor Pecora served as Director of the Humanities Consortium and was the founding Director of the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies.

RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

PROGRAMS

American Studies British and American Literature Creative Writing English Education Rhetoric and Composition

 The Department of English currently has over

500 enrolled students majoring in English and

115 students enrolled in Graduate Programs.

The Garden in Which I Walk (short stories), by Karen Brennan Fireseason ( a novel), by Katharine Coles The Hoopoe’s Crown (poetry), by Jacqueline Osherow Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity (cultural studies), by Vincent Cheng The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth Century American Literature (literary criticism), by Stacey Margolis The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (critical edition), by Janet Kaufman with Anne F. Herzog

Zion Suddenly copper roses glow on the deadwood I am these because I see them and also see Abolition, the white smock on a girl Eating an apple, looking down into The valley, a small train steaming there. I go upland to join death. And death welcomes me, shows me a trailhead, Foot-tracks overfilled with standing water. Man has never owned another man here. Aglow in the shade hang apples free for the taking, I’m saying that death is a little girl. The apple There in her hand is God almighty where the skin Breaks to her teeth and spills my freedom all over Sunlight turning deadwood coppery rose.  Donald Revell, from Pennyweight Windows 6

The Aims of Literar y Representation: Two Perspectives Whether it is governed by convention or correspondence, is sincere or deceptive, the pinnacle or the end of art, realism epitomizes the continuing effect that Plato and Aristotle have had over Western art and literature. The debates over realism are part of the long shadow cast by the theory of mimesis over the whole of Western art and literature. Realism, for this tradition, is not one artistic possibility among others, but an unavoidable imperative that artists and critics either choose to obey or pointedly resist. Despite the difficulties of defining it, and despite efforts by skeptics to question its claims, realism remains the central interpretation of mimesis for modern culture. Matthew Potolsky, Assistant Professor of English excerpted from Mimesis

There was much talk in late September 2001 about the comfort of poetry. Verse was read on radio news programs. Auden was circulated. I was astonished. It had never occurred to me to look to poetry for comfort. Quite the opposite; what I have always valued about poetry is its restiveness: its difficulties and discomforts and terrors. (I am choosing my words carefully). Moreover, the poetry I value, the poetry of the avant-garde, must be difficult—not because it is especially subtle or complex or allusive, but because it makes an assault on the very foundations of normative, communicative language. An exhausted language unable to bear anything like the human narration; a defeated language unable to make a clear-sighted commentary; a mode of speech, or language itself, incapable of making meaning—these might be seen not as impediments to poetry, but rather as its goal. Craig Dworkin, Associate Professor of English

excerpted from “Trotsky’s Hammer”

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY The Department of History offers courses ranging from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome to the modern Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Students are trained in critical thinking, analysis, and effective communication.

STELLAR FACULTY…

Ray Gunn has been selected as the History Department’s first James L. Clayton Distinguished Research Professor. This award honors Emeritus Professor James L. Clayton, who recently retired from the Department. Funded through the generous support of donors, the award was granted for the first time this spring. Professor Gunn will enjoy a two-year term as the Clayton Distinguished Professor, during which time he will have a reduced teaching load, enhanced salary, and research support to help him complete a book manuscript entitled “Bloody Spring: Murder, Retribution, and Justice Denied in a Texas Town.” The Department would like to thank Phil and Gloria Horsley for providing the core of the Clayton Professor endowment.

—

This year, the Associated Students of the University of Utah gave six of the coveted Students’ Choice Awards to faculty members throughout the University. Four such awards went to members of the History Department: Elizabeth Borgwardt, Elizabeth Clement, Glenn Olsen, and John Reed.

—

Professor Nadja Durbach received two awards this year in recognition of her teaching excellence: the Ramona Cannon Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Humanities and the Early Career Teaching Award from the University Teaching Committee.

SUPPORTING OUR STUDENTS Thanks to the generosity of its donors, the History Department now has six named undergraduate scholarships and two named graduate fellowships, including the Dean L. May Graduate Fellowship, for which the department is currently conducting an endowment campaign.

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS Six members of the History Department have had books published in the past year: Lindsay Adams, Megan Armstrong, Nadja Durbach, Colleen McDannell, Glenn Olsen, and Janet Theiss. 8

Narratives of the Past The word history derives from the Latin historia which means a narrative of past events, but also an account, a tale, or a story. The stories that historians tell about the past are based on scrupulous research in archives and libraries, and on detailed interviews with those whose own experiences illuminate a particular historical moment in significant ways. But History is also a deeply creative practice that involves a significant amount of choice about what stories are significant, whose voices should be heard, how we interpret past actions, and how we explain the influence of the past on the present. Until the middle of the twentieth century History was largely practiced from the top down. Its subjects were those most visible and audible in the public sphere, often white, middle- and upper-class, men. In the past fifty years, however, the poor, the working class, women, nonwhite citizens and subjects, colonized peoples, slaves, peasants, gays and lesbians, the sick, disabled, and other “subalterns” have been rescued from what the British social historian E.P. Thompson memorably called “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Their stories have increasingly been told because historians decided that the experiences of these groups were crucial to understanding the political and moral economies of past societies. Narrating the past “from below,” from the perspective of those who are furthest from the sinews of political power, provides crucial insight into the values and ideologies of past societies and the effects of class, race, ethnic, sexual, and gender hierarchies on the experiences and identities of a wide range of historical actors. Choosing to study those people previously written out of the master narratives of History allows us in turn to interrogate the decisions we make within our own cultures about how power and resources are to be distributed and to understand the effect of these choices on all members of society. The stories that historians elect to tell thus help us not only to explain the past, but to think critically about ourselves. Nadja Durbach, Associate Professor of History

The Department of Languages & Literature is committed to fostering a critical and comprehensive understanding of diverse cultures, through the study of literature, language, art, ideas, history and socio-political contexts.

photo: jeffk, www.flickr.com

DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES & LITERATURE

OF INTEREST… Languages & Literature courses and programs are multicultural, interdisciplinary, and integrate language, literature, film, music, popular culture, and media across geographical boundaries. New initiatives have resulted in: • The first public performance of a French play in Salt Lake City in over 20 years, Molière’s“Les Fourberies de Scapin,” was produced by the French Theater Workshop to rave reviews. • The Department continues to broaden its service learning and community outreach programs with various language communities in the area. • A department lecture series in the fall and a Film & Culture lecture series in the spring were introduced in 2004-05. • The first course offering of “Film & Culture Around the World”, a multicultural, interdisciplinary exploration of language, culture and film was offered in spring 2005. • “World and Text” is the department’s initial offering in a series of courses with a comparative focus that brings together many linguistic and national traditions from around the world.

American Sign Language Arabic Chinese Classics Comparative Literature French German Modern Greek Hebrew Italian Japanese Korean Persian Portuguese Russian Spanish Turkish

The Department also offers an extensive array of study abroad programs in countries such as Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia and Spain, which afford students unique opportunities to live the languages and culture of the host countries.

Hideous Progeny and Other Tales of the Humanities When asked to teach our graduate Bibliography and Research class, I surveyed titles featured in a journal on the profession to learn what eminent scholars had to say about writing and publishing in the Humanities today. One scholar wondered, “The Publishing Crisis: [Is it] An issue for Research Universities?” Another offered, “Working through the Crises: A Plan for Action.” Finally, in a more encouraging titled article, a professor had nonetheless hidden this bitter pill:“[…] both [English and Spanish literature] are part of a larger systemic problem. History and even philosophy still sell; scholarship on literature does not.”1 My research revealed that academic publishing was a large systemic problem, a disease. Literary criticism seemed a hideous enterprise, which would end in the production of hideous textual progeny that would find no sympathetic readership. How could I teach students to write in this hostile climate? I turned for help to the most famous hideous enterprise in all literary history: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein makes a devastating error when he finds his creature hideous and rejects it, creating a monster. This irresponsible act is a cautionary tale for literary scholars. Frankenstein helped my graduate students see writing the way Dr. Frankenstein should have approached his creature: As an inspired moment (creation) drawn out into a gradual process (rewriting) that must be allowed to grow without threatening our very being (when your text is rejected, do not hate yourself; chin up and resubmit). That is good intellection, the soul of the Humanities.

STELLAR FACULTY

Christine Jones, Assistant Professor of French

In the last three years... 8 books published or in print, 17 teaching and research awards granted, Over 55 articles published in prestigious journals. 10

Philip Lewis, Domna Stanton, and Judith Ryan in Professions 2004.

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS Linguistics is the study of language structure, use, and variation and change. Linguistics students are exposed to a scientific approach to the study of human language and develop an understanding of the central role that language plays in human society and human cognition. Applied linguistics refers to the application of our study of language to the teaching of languages. Within the Department, which has 12 regular and three auxiliary faculty members, more than 309 students are currently pursuing undergraduate programs and 30 are in graduate programs. Fully two-thirds of students in the Department of Linguistics are focused on teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).

NEW PROGRAMS We continue to expand and improve our programs of study. In 2005-06 we will matriculate students into the following new programs of study: • Ph.D. track in general/theoretical linguistics • Certificate in the Revitalization of Endangered Languages and Cultures (both at the graduate and undergraduate levels)

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS A sampling of recent books by our faculty: Word and World: Practice and Foundation of Language, Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Lyle Campbell The Structure of Modifiers, Edward Rubin Seeking the Heart of Teaching, Adrian Palmer and MaryAnn Christison

INNOVATIVE RESEARCH Lyle Campbell, a world-renowned scholar of both indigenous languages of the Americas and historical linguistics, joined the Linguistics faculty in 2004. Under his direction, the Department of Linguistics launched the new Center for American Indian Languages. CAIL has developed a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History and already houses three major research projects on languages of the Americas: local languages of the Great Basin (Gosiute and Shoshoni), Central American languages (Xinkan, Pipil, and Mocho’), and South American languages (Chorote, Nivacle_ and Kadiwe_u). 12

Utah English The most telling features of speech cueing us to a speaker’s cultural heritage may be very subtle. For example, in the Intermountain West we hear sentences such as “Even Dad did not interrupt or converse that much, but he did do more than most of the males in the conversation.” “I regularly send express mail to foreign countries and have done for several years.” The only other part of the English-speaking world where such sentences are commonly heard are England and Australia and at least in England they have been quite the norm for even the nobility since about the turn of the 20th century Witness Lord Peter Wimsey of the Dorothy Sayer’s mysteries, c. 1920, engaging in conversations such as, “He was not…the sort of man who would have been likely to lay violent hand upon himself?…I suppose he might have done.” rather than using the older form common to the rest of North America: “I suppose he might have.” What does the use of this innovative elliptical phrase tell us about Utah speakers? And how did this do/done innovation get to Utah and skip the rest of English-speaking North America? The clue to resolving this mystery lies in the migration history of Utah. Many Mormon converts immigrated from England directly to Utah at from the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century, by which time large-scale migration from England had all but ceased into other areas of the United States. Immigrants bring many things to their new homes, including their native language or dialect. So a speaker saying, “How will the Clinton people deal with this, or can they do?” with a typical Utah accent suggests that many Utahns must have a cultural connection to England, as their genealogies attest. Another feature of Utah English, is the innovative pronunciation of pairs of words such as healhill, peel-pill, sale-sell, and tale-tell as near homophones. My favorite example of this new rhyming pattern is a Deseret Industries sign encouraging customers to “Take off the chill with/ a D I sweater deal”, clever only if chill and deal rhyme. Since similar innovative pronunciations regularly occur in the older settled parts of the United States from as far east as North Carolina, as far north as Illinois, and as far west as Missouri, guessing that Utah was settled from that region would be a good bet. Indeed the first wave of EuropeanAmerican pioneers to Utah originated from Missouri, previously from central and southern Illinois and Ohio. Then subsequent 19th century converts came from as far south as Mississippi, settling in Dixie, more southern-sounding than the Wasatch Front to this day. Many Utahns may know where their families came from, but most don’t know that linguists can use their speech to reconstruct their cultural heritage. Marianna Di Paolo, Associate Professor of Linguistics

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY Colloquia This year’s Philosophy Department Colloquium focused on on the topic of Environmental Ethics, Science and Policy. Philosophers, ecologists, and historians of science were invited to debate questions about our relationship with and obligations to the environment. The upcoming 12th Annual Philosophy Department Colloquium (February 9-11, 2006) will highlight Neuroscience and Moral Psychology. This conference will feature scholars who strongly support the appeal of neuroscience and scholars who are skeptical about the contribution that neuroscience can make.

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die, by Peggy Battin The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Need, by Deen Chatterjee Ethics Done Right: Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory, by Elijah Millgram Sentimental Rules, by Shaun Nichols

Faculty Awards

• Professor Shaun Nichols won the Stanton Award of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology • Professor Ron Mallon was awarded a Laurence Rockefellor Fellowship at Princeton University

Student Awards • Diana Buccafurni, Pepe Chang, and Peggy Vandenberg were selected to read papers at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities meeting in Philadelphia • Luke Glowacki won the Graduate Book Award for 2004-05 • Dale Clark is the winner of the Department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award • Marissa Lelanuja and Stephen Vorkoper were selected as Outstanding Beginning Teaching Assistants • Brin Bon is the Department’s new Whisner-Appleby scholarship recipient

Understanding Science and Ecology What is science? How does science work? What is the role of science in society? How does society influence how science is done? In one course here in the Philosophy Department, we examine these questions through the lens of one particular science, biology. By examining the history of evolutionary biology, genetics, and genomics, we engage with larger questions of how science works and what the interaction is between science and society. As this is a philosophy class, the aim is not simply to understand the history of biology for its own sake, but also to use this historical work as a way of approaching more general philosophical questions, such “What is a scientific theory?” and “Is there such a thing as ‘human nature?’” In this class, students read, write about and debate these questions. In addition, they view a first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the Marriott Library, visit a web-based historical archive, documenting the dark history of eugenics in the United States, and see a documentary about the discovery of DNA and the new uses of genomics. During the recent colloquium on the topic of Environmental Ethics, Science and Policy, philosophers, ecologists, and historians of science debated questions about our relationship with and obligations to our environment. Students, faculty, and interested members of the local community discussed these issues in a relaxed open-forum atmosphere. Papers at the Colloquium addressed topics as wide-ranging as the role for ecologists and conservation biologists in defining biodiversity, working with the EPA to plan for biodiversity conservation, the idea of “wilderness” and the “natural”, and transgenic mosquitoes: pro or con? From global warming to species preservation to evolution, scientific theories and the very role of science itself have been highly contested. With this course, colloquium, and other interdisciplinary activities in the Philosophy Department, we aim to shed critical light on these debates. Anya Plutynski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy

The history of the Middle East Center reaches back to 1960. It is designated by the US Department of Education as one of the oldest National Resource Centers for Middle East studies in the country. Throughout its existence, it has combined language training with instruction in the history, culture, religion, politics, literature, and textual traditions of the Middle East. The level of student interest in these topics has greatly increased, and the public interest in the region has grown by leaps and bounds. As a result, the Center continues to expand its activities. Through arrangements with many departments and academic programs, the Center has been able to integrate its courses with Middle East content into comprehensive programs of study. Degree programs are designed to be interdisciplinary and to provide breadth and depth in the study of the area.

MISSION

The Middle East Center’s mission entails three fundamental categories: the education of students in order to address the national and international need for expertise on the region; the development and dissemination of new knowledge based on faculty and doctoral student research; enhancing public understanding of the Middle East.

OUTREACH

Lecture Series • Since 2001, the Center has organized an annual lecture series on some of the timeliest topics pertaining to the region. Expert speakers approach these issues through diverse perspectives. The series is broadcast live on the Internet and attracts questions and comments from all over the world. The Middle East Lecture Series is a collaborative effort that contributes significantly to the enhancement of the Center’s reputation nationally and internationally. Archives • The Aziz Atiya Middle East Library, located within the Marriot Library, is a nationally recognized research facility and houses over 150,000 books and periodicals in European and Middle Eastern languages, as well as a rich array of rare books, manuscripts, and microfilm. It also holds valuable papyrus material from early Islamic Egypt and several specialized collections. Resources • Over the course of a school year, the Outreach Program organizes numerous conferences and lectures that welcome audiences from the University and outlying communities. As a service to public education, the program regularly conducts workshops for K-12 teachers, which includes, along with academic materials, hands-on cultural activities. The Center also maintains its own library of audio-visual materials for use by the public.

photo: leenient, www.flickr.com

MIDDLE EAST CENTER

OVERHEARD... The following excerpts derive from the remarks of two of this year’s Middle East Lecture Series distinguished lecturers:

“Let me express my pleasure to you at being included in the inauguration symposia for President Young. I said to a small group at lunch this afternoon that it was always a great comfort to me when I was Secretary of State to know that [University of Utah President] Mike Young was one of my lawyers. When you’re going to serve in Washington D.C. in the political environment we have now, you better have yourself a good lawyer. And I had an extraordinarily able lawyer, who served me and his country extraordinarily well. So you have an energetic administrator who’s your president and his hard work and vision I know will greatly benefit this fine school. Let me say it’s also a privilege to speak today to so many of you who are interested in the Middle East. I have always felt that honest exchange of ideas and information plays a vital role in conflict resolution and lecture series such as this one I think can assist that process.” Former Secretary of State James Baker

“[The debate on U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East] changed dramatically since 9/11 for a number of reasons. There was a sudden discovery that America is not liked in the Middle East. When public opinion polls were done in Arab and Muslim countries after 9/11, most people in America were shocked to find out that in countries with whom the U.S. had close relations, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, public opinion is highy critical of the United States. Once they started asking “why” they began answering the question by looking at the role of governments and concluding that governments were either unable or unwilling to shape public opinion anymore. It’s problematic to leave public opinion strictly to Middle Eastern governments and it is no longer possible to pursue the same policy that was pursued earlier. While public opinion by itself does not translate into militancy, militant groups are going to have an easier time recruiting people if there is a high degree of anger. People correlated this anger with the existence of militancy, particularly oriented toward the U.S.” Professor Shibley Telhami, Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, University of Maryland

TANNER HUMANITIES CENTER Vincent J. Cheng,

the Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English, has been Director of the Tanner Humanities Center since 2003. The previous year, he had been a Fellow at the Tanner Center, working on a book which has just recently been published. We highlight Professor Cheng’s book here as an example of the innovative interdisciplinary work being done by the Fellows and scholars at the Tanner Humanities Center– and as a reminder of the importance and relevance of the Humanities in daily life.

Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity Adapted from material by Rutgers University Press, 2004

Who is “authentic” and who is “other” in a given culture? Who can speak for the “other”? What do we mean by authenticity? These are critical questions that today’s world—brought closer together and yet pulled farther apart by globalism and necolonialism—has been unable to answer. Inauthentic compellingly probes these issues through revealing case studies on the pursuit of authenticity and identity. Each chapter explores the ways in which we construct “authenticity” in order to replace seemingly vacated identities, including: the place of minorities in academia; mixed-race dynamics; the popularity of Irish culture in America; the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland; Jewish American identity; the status of Jewish America in relation to Israel and Palestine; the cultural problems of international adoptions; and the rapidly changing nature of the Asian American population in the United States.

our need to imagine our foreign-born, non-white adopted babies as radically and essentially different from our own American selves—itself any different from the dynamic we might, in different contexts, actually condemn as “racial profiling”? The book’s controversial chapter on “International Adoption and Identity: The Anxiety over Authentic Cultural Heritage” explores such issues and takes on many of the sacred cows, social practices, and professional advice recommended by adoption services and followed by millions of adoptive families in the fast-growing world of the international adoption market. Was Marilyn Monroe really Jewish? Even if she did convert, could she ever be “authentic” enough? What does it mean to be Jewish or to have a Jewish identity? “The Inauthentic Jew: Jewishness and Its Discontents” investigates the notions of Jewishness and Jewish identity—slippery terms which keep sliding unevenly between the registers and paradigms of religion, ethnicity, race, culture, and nation. In the resultant and heightened anxiety over who and what is authentically Jewish—at a time when yiddishkeit, as a traditional, fully-lived Jewish culture and whole way of life, has all but disappeared in America—how can American Jews, especially “secular Jews,” continue to feel authentically Jewish? Is religious orthodoxy the only alternative? In such a crisis of cultural authenticity, when so many American Jews feel “inauthentic” and are trying to get back in touch with a sense of Jewishness, both the Holocaust (as institution) and the Palestinian intifadas (as ongoing crises)—horrible and deplorable as they are—have each managed conveniently to provide American Jews with a cultural balm, with new—and troubling—ways to connect with Jewishness and affirm a continuing sense of Jewish identity. What do golfer Tiger Woods, actor Keanu Reeves, and TV anchorwoman Ann Curry all have in common? They are all mixed-race “Asian Americans.” What do Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Samoans, Koreans, and Filipinos in this country all have in common? They have all suddenly become “Asian Americans.” “Asian American Identity: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly–and the Future” argues that, indeed, our recently-invented term “Asian American” is virtually synonymous with “mixed race”— and that, as much as the fast-growing population calling itself Asian America would like to see itself as a unified ethnic culture and political bloc, it is in fact neither a culture nor an ethnicity but a wholly invented identity. And yet it is quickly becoming precisely all of those things—an identifiable culture, an identity, an ethnicity—right before our very eyes. But as Asian Americans begin to dominate our university student bodies, as they increasingly graduate into high-income professions, and as they marry white Americans at startling rates (over 50 percent of native-born Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Americans marry whites), will Asian Americans be the next group to become “white,” to ascend to whiteness—just as the Italians, Irish, and Jews each have done, in turn, over the past century? Or will Asians in this country continue to be (as the Vincent Chin incident, the Wen Ho Lee affair, and the U.S. Patriot Act would seem to indicate) forever the “yellow peril,” the “foreigner within,” or (more recently) the Islamic terrorist?

For example: Adoption is certainly a popular and striking phenomenon today in American culture, especially the adoption of non-white babies from the Third World. But why do white parents who adopt such foreign-born babies obsess so much about providing them with an “authentic” cultural and racial heritage (Chinese, Indian, Korean, or whatever)? What does an “authentic” heritage even mean? After all, who is your adopted child really?—the self that develops in a lived everyday American culture, or the self that has inherited a particular and radically different cultural/national/ ethnic heritage? What sense, if any, of authentic identity can be available to such children? Why do we need to imagine that our own American culture isn’t authentic enough to count? And how is

These are examples of the issues taken on in Vincent J. Cheng’s new book, Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity. As a Chinese native born in Taiwan and raised in various countries around the globe before becoming a U.S. citizen; as an Asian American scholar who is a Professor of English Literature specializing in Irish studies; as a lapsed Catholic married to an observant Jew and bringing up their adopted Taiwanese baby boy as a Jew—Vincent Cheng literally embodies and inhabits the “inauthentic,” and has for many years confronted and contemplated the complex dynamics and ironies of cultural, racial, and national “authenticity” and identity. His analyses and observations can be at once lively, entertaining, controversial, and disturbing. Written in an accessible style, Inauthentic presents provocative analyses of contemporary notions of identity to academic scholars as well as a broad reading audience.

ASIAN STUDIES PROGRAM The Arts were prominent among the events sponsored by the Asian Studies Program in 2005-06. The year started with a public reception to introduce the Asian art collection at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The event, which included dance and music performances from India, Vietnam and Korea, was so popular that another was organized, drawing some 400 people from the campus and community. The program also sponsored a popular public performance and lecture by Korean pansori singer Chan Park, and an exhibit of Japanese calligraphy at the Marriott Library. • Faculty led three new and very successful study abroad progams, including a China semester of coursework and travel, an intensive Chinese summer language program in Tianjin, and an architecture studio in Japan in which students designed and constructed two teahouses for the 2005 World Expo. • Our new Korean historian, Professor Hwasook Nam, also won a grant from the Korea Foundation to sponsor a major international conference in spring 2006.

— INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PROGRAM The International Studies program continued its rapid growth during the 2004-05 academic year, doubling in size and sending 24 graduates to law schools, business and government employment, and other activities. The program celebrated its second anniversary in Spring 2005 by hosting a series of public lectures with the support of a grant from the U.S. Department of Education as well as many programs and departments of the University. Distinguished scholars from Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Duke University, Tufts University and Northeastern University discussed with faculty and students topics including the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican economy, the experiences of Korean immigrants in Tokyo, and human rights politics.

— LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM The Latin American Studies program, now three years old, has become a focal point for teaching, research, and community outreach for faculty and students with interests in Latin America. LAS faculty took a group of students to Ecuador in the summer of 2004 on a Group Project Abroad, and the program has joined with Brigham Young University’s Center for Latin American Studies to form an Intermountain Center for Latin American Studies. This project will provide the basis for expanded course offerings for students, greater community involvement, and a stronger presence across campus. 20

Area Studies Area studies programs developed in American universities after World War II, a response to the emergence of the United States as a world power. Implicit in those programs was the recognition that the U.S. must understand other regions of the world – Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union – in order to meet its global responsibilities. But these interdisciplinary programs implied relatively static notions of “national cultures” that were geographically located in specific places. Thus, while they helped to create greater understanding of the languages and cultures of other parts of the world, they tended to ignore transnational phenomena and the interaction of different cultures. The increased prominence of immigration, refugee, and environmental issues, as well as the dangers from terrorism in recent years remind us that national borders do not easily contain these fundamental aspects of the globalizing world in which we all live. The international programs of the College of Humanities respond to the challenges of globalization with innovative programs and curricula that introduce students to the variety of peoples and cultures in the world and give them the analytical tools to understand the complex world in which they will live their lives. Asian Studies, Latin American Studies and International Studies are explicitly interdisciplinary, with core curricula and program requirements that require students to learn different forms of analysis of their chosen subject. Language study is an important part of these programs as well, and students are encouraged to travel to the part of the world they are studying, especially through Study Abroad programs that combine academic learning with direct experience. Through these programs the College of Humanities is an active participant in the national discussion about effective and innovative ways to study the world. Jim Lehning, Professor of History Director, International Studies Program

Property and Propriety: Adam Smith as Rhetorician and Economist

UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM

The University of Utah holds a number of treasures in its special collections, but the most special for me is a 1776 edition of Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” Although praised in the abstract in business schools, an affinity for Adam Smith’s writing is something of a curiosity outside the circles of economic history. Even among those familiar with Smith’s most famous treatise, very few know of his work as a moral philosopher. Fewer still recall that for three years, he was a lecturer in rhetoric. Yet from 1748-1751, Smith lectured on rhetoric and belle lettres at the University of Edinburgh under the heading of moral philosophy, instructing young Scotts on the qualities of good writing. Smith’s lectures were widely popular and additional evidence suggests that he used the same lectures in 1763 at the University of Glasgow. Smith’s classical education in Greek and Latin no doubt is one explanation for his work as a lecturer, but more curious is the relationship between Smith’s rhetoric and his extracurricular interest in economics. What is the relationship between eloquence and economics?

The University Writing Program (UWP) was established in 1983 to create undergraduate writing instruction and teacher training for these courses, to develop and support writing-acrossthe-curriculum initiatives, and to develop and enhance graduate work in writing studies. While the UWP offers undergraduate instruction in courses that fulfill general education and university requirements, the Program is an autonomous unit within the College of Humanities. It has no undergraduate major at this time, but offers a minor in Literacy Studies, an MA degree in rhetoric/composition in English, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in rhetoric/composition whose students enroll through the departments of Communication, English, and Education.

OF INTEREST... One of the UWP’s undergraduate courses, Intermediate Writing, offers the most sections with the lowest enrollments of any course offered by a department or program on campus—136 sections with a 23-student limit per class. Students are thus able to receive individual attention and feedback, both essential for learning to write.

Propriety and national usage in eighteenth century rhetorics provide useful categories to explore how language use and property intersect. In England, the virtues of proper speech were evidence of internal fitness and a sign of one’s rightful place in the social order. As Scottish students attempted to gain access to positions in the British bureaucracy, the mastery of proper English was requisite to success. Ironically the presence of refined taste was always presumed to have a natural character, despite clear evidence that an appropriate style could be taught, learned, and emulated. It is my contention that the emerging significance of national usage, grammatical purity, and masculine propriety in English language rhetorics demonstrates how the ends of rhetoric in the eighteenth century were turned to the development of both economy and empire. As a rhetorician interested in the relationship between public discourse and public culture, I am fascinated by the ways in which nationalist aims are present in the adaptation of classical commonplaces to the context of the emergent British imperialism. Just as Smith counseled a turn from mercantilism to capitalism, Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and belle lettres underscore a turn to rhetoric fit for an emerging global power.

— The UWP is collaborating with AMES, the Academy of Math, Education, and Science, a public charter high school founded as part of former Governor Leavitt’s New Century High School Initiative. The goal of the collaboration is to give students, especially those from under-served populations, access to higher education through early instruction, in our case, writing instruction.

— The UWP faculty is of national and international stature. For example, Professor Thomas Huckin was selected this year as Visiting Scholar for the prestigious Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program, joining the ranks of other nationally renowned scholars in their fields who have delivered public lectures and worked with a select group of students from the State.

— The University Writing Center, housed in the Marriott Library and open to all students on campus, is now in its third year helping students improve their academic and professional writing. Student usership has increased by 30% over the previous year.

- Daniel Emery, Assistant Professor of Communication & Writing Rare Books Division Special Collections J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah

VANISHING VOICES

LANGUAGE PRESERVATION WITH THE CENTER FOR AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES At the time of first European contact, more than 2,000 languages were spoken in the Americas. Today only about 175 in North America and 450 in Latin America survive, and, worse, many become extinct each year. Predictions are that if nothing is done to stem the alarmingly accelerated current rate of language extinction, 90% of the world’s languages will not survive to the end of this century; in the best case scenario, 35% to 50% will die (Krauss 1992). For many Native American languages, the situation is extremely precarious: of the 175 indigenous languages still spoken in North America, 155 are moribund, and only 20 (11%) are still being learned by children! This is critical because it is only by children learning them and passing them on that languages survive to the next generation. This situation poses scientific, moral, and practical problems of enormous proportions.

What do we lose when we lose a language?

The Cherokee Syllabary, invented in 1821 by Chief Sequoya, is the most developed script ever created by an American native.

The disappearance of an individual language is a monumental loss of scientific and human information; it might loosely be compared in gravity to the loss of the spotted owl or the Bengal tiger. However, the extinction of whole families of languages is an unspeakable tragedy, comparable in magnitude to the loss of whole branches of the animal kingdom, say the loss of all felines: imagine attempting to understand the animal kingdom with major branches missing.

Addressing endangered languages is widely acknowledged as one of the highest priorities currently facing humanity. Much of the cultural identity and intellectual life of a people is experienced through their own language. The life-enriching value of literature is no less true of the oral literatures of indigenous peoples of the Americas – they, too, have grappled with the complexities of the world and problems of life, and their insights represented in their literatures are of no less value to us all. The value of history is fundamental in the humanities, and yet the many aspects of a people’s history recoverable from their languages (their classification and its contribution to understanding their past, their contacts and migrations documented through loanwords, etc.) are irretrievably lost when a language becomes extinct without adequate documentation. An indigenous people’s knowledge of an ecosystem developed over centuries is encoded by their language and so the ability to pass down that crucial knowledge often dies with the death of the language.

An interdisciplinary approach

In linguistics, the need to address endangered languages is currently accorded the highest priority, and is intimately connected with concerns for cultural survival, indigenous rights, and environmental issues. This makes endangered languages of concern also, in addition to linguistics, to anthropologists, biologists, geographers, people in the legal profession, educators, political scientists, and most significantly, to American Indians and Native American organizations generally. Thus, while CAIL is primarily administered through the Department of Linguistics, participation is not limited by discipline – for some tasks, interdisciplinary efforts are most effective. CAIL’s commitment to an interdisciplinary approach is exemplified by the new Certificate in the Revitalization of Endangered Languages and Cultures.

Why documentation is important The documentation of endangered languages in dictionaries, grammars, and audio and video texts ranging over many genres from casual chit-chat to spell-binding epics is necessary for a full understanding of the human cognitive abilities manifested through language, and documentation assists survival in many cases; it contributes to community development, literacy, and education in many instances; and it serves political and public policy with respect to indigenous peoples and their rights in still other cases. CAIL, located in historic Fort Douglas on the University of Utah campus, is dedicated to: (1) urgent and ambitious research on the endangered languages and cultures of Native America, (2) to training of students to address scholarly and practical needs involving these languages and their communities of speakers (with training for native speakers and those whose heritage languages are involved), and (3) to work with community members where languages and cultures are endangered towards linguistic and cultural revitalization. The Center currently partners with the Smithsonian Institute for projects related to language documentation, preservation and publication.

REACHING OUT TO THE COMMUNIT Y EXTRAORDINARY EVENINGS As the heart and soul of the University of Utah, the College of Humanities shoulders the responsibility of serving as the conscience and memory of what is beautiful, just and true – especially in a world that is becoming increasingly complex and too indifferent to these important concerns. We accept this responsibility on behalf of our students and the local community. We therefore organize an extraordinary “Evening” each year, which is now anticipated by hundreds of thoughtful students and citizens. A modest amount of funds are raised at each of these events, which are set aside for student scholarships in the humanities. In July 2003 we presented “A Proper British Evening with President Gordon B. Hinckley,” where our distinguished alumnus, President Hinckley, helped us recall our cultural, historical and literary inheritance from the United Kingdom. In November 2004, we hosted “From the Arctic to the Red Rock: An Evening of Environmental Humanities,” where Arctic photographer Subhankar Banerjee, Audubon illustrator David Allen Sibley, and environmental author Terry Tempest Williams reminded us of the necessary beauty of wilderness, and of environmental ethics. This year, on December 1, the College is pleased to present“An Evening of Conscience,” featuring human rights photographer Sebastião Salgado, Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, and author Terry Tempest Williams, who will have recently returned from Rwanda. Each of these compassionate thinkers will offer compelling perspectives on peace, human rights and human dignity. During the holiday season, it is our intention to locally inspire awareness of the world’s homeless peoples, of the forces that have uprooted them from their homes, and to consider what responsibility we might share for their condition. Please plan on joining us! For more information, call (801) 585-3988.

SPONSORSHIP OF A LATINO/A YOUTH SOCCER LEAGUE The College is entering its third year of sponsoring a 100-team Latino/a youth soccer league in Salt Lake County. Players in the league, which includes 1800 girls and boys ranging in age from six to 19 years old, have come to view the College as an institutional friend dedicated to helping them achieve the promise of higher education. Many wear team jerseys imprinted with “Colegio de Humanidades.” The College is extremely grateful to a recent gift from Zeke and Katherine Dumke, which enables us to sponsor this league for three additional years. 26

HUMANITIES HAPPY HOUR In its fourth year, the Humanities Happy Hour is retaining its status as perhaps the most infamous of the College’s community/alumni activities. Held at Squatters Pub Brewery in downtown Salt Lake City, the Happy Hour boasts nearly 300 members and meets on the third Thursday of every month from 5-7 p.m. Halfway through each Happy Hour, one of the College’s excellent professors offers an “intellectual hors d’oeuvres” – a ten-minute talk on a subject that we bill as “timely, timeless and provocative.” Occasionally there is music, and spontaneous dancing between members has been known to break out. Last year, we began a holiday tradition for the December Happy Hour that we call, “A Blues Christmas.” This is an occasion for members to bring their friends to the Humanities Happy Hour, listen to blues music, enjoy some Christmas libations, and most importantly, contribute to the College’s “Community Scholarships for Diversity” fund. We use this fund to help first-generation college students begin and complete their university degree. For more information about the Humanities Happy Hour, call (801) 585-3988.

RENAISSANCE GUILD Now entering its third year, the Renaissance Guild – still whimsically referred to as “the mother of all book clubs” – has a new home in Salt Lake City’s beautiful Hotel Monaco. With this year’s membership approaching 50, we will meet four times during the academic year at the Hotel Monaco to discuss the following books (provided free of charge by Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore): F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours; and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams. Distinguished faculty of the College will lead the book discussions. Also, at each event, the Hotel Monaco will provide hors d’oeuvres, and music will be performed by one or two University of Utah music majors. Member’s gifts are applied towards graduate student scholarships in the College of Humanities. For more information, please call (801) 585-3988.

T H E D E PA R T M E N T O F E N G L I S H W E LCO M E S

Vincent Pecora

AS THE INAUGUR AL GORDON B. HINCKLE Y PROFESSOR

The College of Humanities has realized one of its most important goals in hiring Vincent Pecora as the first Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and Culture. Professor Pecora comes to us from UCLA, where he taught for the past twenty years. He has a distinguished record of publication that includes three books and dozens of articles. His book-length studies include Self and Form in Modern Narrative (1989) and Households of the Soul (1997). The University of Chicago Press will soon publish his most recent book, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Professor Pecora has a strong record as a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate students, and he has made outstanding service contributions to UCLA and to the profession as a whole. He will bring his experience as Director of UCLA’s Humanities Consortium and as founding Director of its Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies to his new role of fostering the study of British culture at the University of Utah. The Gordon B. Hinckley Endowment was established in the College of Humanities in the late 1990s. Gordon B. Hinckley, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is an alumnus of the College (English ’32), and through his generous support and the help of many individual donors the Hinckley Endowment has become a major force in the cultural and intellectual life of the University. It provides numerous learning opportunities for students, faculty, and members of the community at large. Substantial scholarships are provided for students wishing to study in England through the English Department’s annual British Studies Seminar Abroad, and outstanding scholars are brought to campus for public lectures, including the recent visit of Professor Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard, one of the world’s leading authorities on the English Renaissance.

The College is delighted to welcome Professor Pecora to the Hinckley Professorship. He brings to this distinguished position both an outstanding academic record and an energetic vision for the future of British Studies at the University of Utah.

photo: François Camoin

Professor Pecora will now oversee the activities and programs funded by the Gordon B. Hinckley Endowment, teach a variety of courses in British literature, and pursue his own vigorous research. He has dynamic plans for advancing British Studies at the University of Utah. “It’s clear that we need to take both a global and interdisciplinary approach to British Studies,” Pecora says. “The task is to put together an up-to-date study of British culture, and for this a sense of the larger role of Britain and the English language in a global context is clearly necessary. We can’t study British literature in national or geographical isolation.” Professor Pecora also intends to support and develop an interdisciplinary approach to studying British culture: “We need to read British literature in an interdisciplinary way—to see it in terms of its relationship with art and philosophy. Sociology and anthropology are particularly important disciplines for the study of Twentieth-Century British writing.”

Professor Vincent Pecora joins the College of Humanities as the inaugural Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and Culture.

the ecology of residency

And then he told them stories of floating down Glen Canyon before it was dammed and he exhorted them to help take the dam down with their monkey wrenches.

Terry Tempest Williams

“A monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction,” Ken said. “Ed told me the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration.” He looked at these beautiful students directly. “The monkey wrench is your own talent, your gifts, that is how you are going to fix the world.”

On June 3, 2005, ten remarkable students arrived at the Castle Valley Inn just outside Moab, Utah. They enrolled in a field course entitled,“The Ecology of Residency,” a twelve-day exploration of what it means to live in place.

During these days, these students pondered and discussed ideas of destruction and restoration, erosion and deposition, floods and droughts as they walked to Morning Glory Arch in silence, as they floated down the Colorado River at dusk.

The place was Castle Valley, Utah, a small desert hamlet approximately nine miles long and three miles wide walled in by wilderness. The LaSal Mountains rise to the south; Porcupine Ridge lies to the west; Castleton Tower stands to the east; and the Colorado River holds the boundary to the north.

They were graced by animal mentors: Grey Fox, Collared Lizard, Turkey Vulture, Deer, Rabbit, Mountain Lion watching behind willows. And they mentored each other as the land mentored them.

Each student of the Ecology of Residency cource not only explored the exterior landscape of redrocks and ravens, sandstone and sage, datura, dragonflies, and the Colorado River—they dared to explore their interior landscape, as well. Biological literacy opened the door to what it means to be human and how we extend our compassion, our awareness to the larger community of Life.

“If we know where we are, we know who we are—” Wendell Berry writes. These students learned where they were through community mentors. Consequently, stories of the wild triggered stories of their own natural histories. These narratives from the heart are raw, open, deep, and true—born out of both vulnerability and strength. This is the power of marrying the humanities with the sciences, of opening the door to not only an environmental ethic that can heal the world, but enhance its meaning. We do not live in isolation but in a shimmering web of relationships that asks us to be awake, alive, and engaged.

These students made maps of water with water colors. They hiked to Delicate Arch. They learned the names of plants, insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. They learned to see rocks that tell time differently.

These students are engaged. They are brave. They dared to dig deep. They dared to be open and change. And they did it together. Call them the future. Call them our hope. Call them a people in place with principles emerging. Dragonflies in the desert. Ephemeral beauty.

They sat in a circle with Ken Sleight at Pack Creek Ranch and listened to stories about Edward Abbey and the Monkey Wrench Gang beneath cottonwood trees. They asked“Seldom Seen Smith” what it means to be an environmentalist. He told them that to be an activist is to be engaged in the preservation of life. And he told them life is most immediate in wilderness.

Environmental Humanities opens the conversation to a complete world in all our incompleteness. We engage in dialogue with Other—other disciplines, other species, other options and paradigms of beings.

Approximately three hundred individuals live in Castle Valley. Culture and landscape inform one another. This is a community that courts the wild.

It is allowing ourselves to cross over the threshold of certainty to uncertainty, leaving behind certitude and dogma of fixed points and entering a river of possibilities. Paradox replaces consistency. Verticality bows to circularity. The goal of summiting a mountain is questioned by the beauty of its flanks. We are present. “The most forward looking people see sideways....” The Ecology of Residency was a time for looking sideways. Together. This group of individuals changed my life. It was my great privilege to accompany them.

photo: Brandon Hollingshead

- Terry Tempest Williams is the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities.

The Human Touch Revitalizing the College of Humanities Brent Hullinger Reprinted and excerpted with permission, Continuum, Summer 2005

Jaymes Myers knew that his announcement wasn’t going to go over well. After all, as a freshman chemistry major at the University of Utah, Myers had been groomed for most of his life to be right where he was. He was the first person in his family to attend college, studying in a field his parents felt would lead directly into a lucrative career—a career they hoped would elevate him beyond their own financial station. Those hopes dimmed, however, when Myers sat his parents down and announced a switch: Goodbye chemistry, hello speech communication. “Well,” said his mother, echoing a common perception of the humanities,“there’s no money in that.” Image: Royter Snow Design

Maybe it happened during the tech boom of the late ’90s, when ethics were sometimes sidelined in pursuit of the next great gadget and another uptick on the NASDAQ. Or maybe it was much earlier, when Grog skipped his clan’s woolly mammoth feast to play with the new wheel he’d carved 33

out of a rock. Somewhere along the line, we put a little more value on technology, and a little less on humanity. In many ways, higher education has followed suit, becoming less about germinating well-rounded, thoughtful citizens and more about cranking out employees. Eschewing the liberal arts core on which they were founded, many universities promote more “glamorous” (read: revenue-generating) fields like the applied sciences, engineering, technology, and business. The result on campuses nationwide is humanities colleges that are largely marginalized, both in terms of funding and scholarly prestige. Not so at the U, where a concerted effort in recent years has put a new face on the College of Humanities. Under the direction of an impassioned dean, the college has—in just three years— increased funding by more than 450 percent, launched cutting-edge programs that are the first of their kind in the country, sponsored groundbreaking community initiatives, and generally raised the profile and morale of the college. Despite national decreases in both funding and prestige, enrollment in the humanities has remained relatively stable. As U of U linguistics professor Lyle Campbell points out, humanities colleges across the country often have the largest proportion of students taking the largest proportion of classes. “If you’re simply looking at student demand,” says Campbell, “then the humanities are in great shape. If you’re looking at who’s bringing in the money, then humanities have always had kind of a liability, because in the humanities we just don’t have access to those consultancies and private accounts that you do in law, engineering, medicine, et cetera.” This was exactly the predicament Robert Newman found upon taking over as the humanities dean in 2001. At the time, the college received just one tenth of one percent of the University’s total grant monies, even while it conferred 20 percent of the University’s diplomas. Since Humanities is the third-largest college on campus, this exposed a huge disconnect between funding and student demand, further highlighted by the fact that every undergraduate who enters the University enrolls

in humanities classes at some time during the course of his or her studies. Newman immediately initiated a reformation, starting from the ground up.“We needed a cultural change in the college,” he says.“There was the sense that in the humanities, you kind of waited at the back of the line for things to happen. I think people needed to learn to believe in themselves and the significance of what they were doing.” And what they were doing, in Newman’s view, was nothing less than providing the principled foundation for the University and society as a whole. At its core, the humanities attempt to decipher and describe what it means to be human. In that sense, they have a distinct advantage over disciplines bound by scientific rules and mathematical formulas. The skills learned in humanities can be applied to virtually any vocation. “I think any good professional person,” says Newman, “will tell you that their experience in their basic liberal arts core has been fundamental to their success. Because what we teach is how to think creatively, comparatively, and systematically. We also teach how to communicate effectively and how to process life experience in ways that are fulfilling and ethical. There’s no question in my mind that the humanities are fundamental for success in a democratic society.” To get this message out, the college launched a number of highly successful community-based initiatives designed to reconnect the humanities with the community at large. On top of this wave of community outreach, the College of Humanities has introduced a series of groundbreaking scholarly programs, with an emphasis on international and interdisciplinary studies. All of these ambitious scholarly and community initiatives have translated into something that is not always associated with the humanities: money. In 2002, grants and donations to the College of Humanities totaled just $477,612. By 2004 that figure was nearly $2 million. As of mid-2005, the college had taken in $2,675,775, a 460 percent increase over 2002. The number of new donors that the college attracted jumped from 281 in 2002 to 483 in 2004, a 72 percent increase.

photo: www.greeneyesinafrica.org

Grant funding within the college has been particularly impressive, as faculty members have increased the number and dollar amounts of their grant requests. Lyle Campbell attributes much of this increase directly to Dean Newman. “I think he’s gotten the idea of the need out to faculty members in our college,” says Campbell. “But he’s also providing needed information and mentoring so that people who in the past might not have asked for research money, or even attempted research projects, now are doing it.” The numbers certainly support that claim. The college submitted just 10 grant proposals in 1999. That number jumped to 65 in 2004. Funds awarded went from $45,493 in 2001 to $1,202,053 in 2004. Numbers like these go a long way toward reversing an ingrained perception that the humanities are—as Robert Newman puts it—“the welfare state” of the university. The influx of hard cash serves notice that the humanities, in addition to being the scholarly core of a university, can also be a vital cog in its economic engine. That’s good news for students like Myers, who is now a junior and on track to graduate next year with his degree in speech communication and a minor in ethnic studies. In three years he has seen both tangible and intangible benefits from the humanities’ resurgence, including an energized faculty that is actively seeking to connect with students. Most of all, though, he is comfortable knowing that he has found his home in the humanities—that what he is doing has purpose.

FROM ECUADOR TO THE EMMYS

“I think what I’m learning, and what the humanities have made me passionate about,” says Myers,“is understanding people’s experiences. And how that translates into my own goal is really becoming a global citizen, becoming someone who can affect and change society for the better.”

Congratulations to Ryan Oliver Hansen, an electronic journalism graduate (‘05), who recently won an Emmy for his documentary,“An Orphan’s Gift,” the personal story of Ryan’s work at an orphanage in Ecuador, where he worked as a volunteer in the summer and fall of 2004.

Somehow, there’s got to be a future in that.

The documentary also won 3rd place, and a $1,000 prize, in the Christopher’s competition, a national award on the subject of “One Person Can Make a Difference.”

—Brett Hullinger is a freelance writer living in Salt Lake City.

Ryan is currently raising funds for travel to Africa, where he will begin work in another orphanege. He left September 18th for this new volunteer work. While in Africa, he will videotape reports to be aired on Channel 4’s “Profiles in Caring” series, which will help support him in his volunteer effort. The Emmy was awarded in the Student Division at the Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards Saturday, September 10th, in Arizona. For more information on Ryan’s project, visit www.greeneyesinafrica.org.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Stutterer

Lizard Tree

Baker’s sugar snow

Do I help you remember how language is the gathered effort of an entire body seized by need

Here in our garden you are a gnarled, spindly intruder, the transplanted heart Of an old conjure woman.

Wet on my neck sticks to my scarf. You take yours off as the car heater kicks in.

Nourishing you is no easy task: the fastidious pruning and insecticides, the plastic covers for the cold. You ward me off

City with its head in the clouds but clear streets some ten feet high. City weighed down by thick white.

With claws three inches long and shriveled fruit: poisonous lemons whose fragrance still haunts the yard.

Grade-school parachute game cloud line—we would raise it above our heads and hide under and look each other in the eyes.

How will I know you are dead— when you no longer dart around me, when the hiss of wind subsides

No one is keeping you here. Let me drive you to some other place. I have nothing to say. I will only talk about the weather.

to say an ordinary thing? Do I help you remember how words are just breath in the end, a bellows’ quick squeeze? Or maybe thinking of me you remember the small wonder of the syllable,

Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)

how it may suddenly color the air and then hover and hover there, thrashing its wings to stay perfectly still. - Mike White

- Peter Covino - Kathryn Cowles

Contributed by graduate students in the Department of English’s Creative Writing Program. 38

In order to qualify for these scholarships, students must be studying one of the areas in the College of Humanities, be the first in their families to earn a Bachelor’s Degree, be able to

STUDENT SCHOLARSHIPS

demonstrate leadership in their communities, and have financial need. Now in our second year of the scholarship program, we are beginning to see the tremendous value of the program. For our campus, it challenges stereotypes, broadens

ach year undergraduates in the College of Humanities apply for some of the most

perspectives and fosters mutual respect. For our students who receive this award, it

prestigious scholarships offered on campus. Some of these prominent, college-wide awards

represents economic opportunity for a better life – for themselves, their families, and the

include the Steffensen-Cannon, Kennecott, O.C. Tanner, Mostofi, LoPrest, and Hagander.

entire community.

In addition each department in the College offers undergraduate student scholarships. All together the College awards over $275,000 each year in undergraduate support. These awards

College of Humanities students are involved in a variety of programs both on and off

come in the form of tuition waivers, study abroad funding, book awards, and stipends.

campus. Some of these include the KUED, KRCL, United Way, Boys and Girls Club, SpyHop Productions, Girl Scouts of America, Youth-Works, Utah Black Council,

As a first-generation college student, this scholarship has given me an opportunity to fulfill a life-time goal. My degree will allow me to be a role model for others and eventually it will provide me the ability to provide opportunities for others.

Learning to go to school can be a tough process, especially if you are the first person in your family to try it. It’s nice to know that others are supporting my goals and dreams. It is like the whole community is looking out for me.

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Associated Medical Students of America, National TRIO Program, Sanderson Community Center for the Deaf, Lowell C. Bennion Service Center, Utah Daily Chronicle, Asian American Student Association, Pacific Islander Student Association, and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan.

2004-05 Scholarship Recipient

Beginning in 2004, the College added to these awards by instituting the Community

Scholarships for Diversity program. This program is designed to link our communities to campus. With generous contributions from community members, the College is able to award scholarships to first-generation college students studying in the Humanities. 40

CONVOCATION May 6, 2005

“

Billions of other human beings daily share the earth with us, and I personally see great privilege and opportunity before us, that we may take our personal humanity and use it for good. Long ago, Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave in ancient Rome, said, “Only the educated are free.” We now have the opportunity to educate others in the world; our leaders, our families, our friends, our enemies, and those we do not understand. We have the opportunity to give them the freedom that Epictetus spoke of…Today, I challenge each of you, and myself, to take all that you are, all that you have become through your experiences here, and educate others as you would have others educate you. Give the world freedom.

“

- Sarah Janel Jackson, Communication (‘05) Excerpt from commencement address, given May 6, 2004

HONOREES AT THIS YEAR’S CONVOCATION INCLUDED: Angelina Chan, Young Alumni Association Outstanding Senior Award Thomas B. Green, Distinguished Alumnus David E. Simmons, Honorary Distinguished Alumnus Nadja Durbach, Ramona W. Cannon Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities & Early Career Teaching Award Liz Leckie, Perlman Award for Staff: Excellence in Student Counseling

THANK YOU The students and faculty of the College of Humanities wish to express their profound gratitude to the many friends and alumni who have offered financial gifts this past year. We appreciate them for recognizing that, ultimately, a â&#x20AC;&#x153;Research Oneâ&#x20AC;? university is only as good as its liberal arts core. The enduring strength of the University of Utah is tied directly to the strength of the College of Humanities, and we draw our strength from the resources our generous donors help provide.