Engaging the Age of Jane Austen

Engaging the Age of Jane Austen
Author: Bridget Draxler
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1609386140

Humanities scholars, in general, often have a difficult time explaining to others why their work matters, and eighteenth-century literary scholars are certainly no exception. To help remedy this problem, literary scholars Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt offer this collection of essays to defend the field’s relevance and demonstrate its ability to help us better understand current events, from the proliferation of media to ongoing social justice battles. The result is a book that offers a range of approaches to engaging with undergraduates, non-professionals, and broader publics into an appreciation of eighteenth-century literature. Essays draw on innovative projects ranging from a Jane Austen reading group held at the public library to students working with an archive to digitize an overlooked writer’s novel. Reminding us that the eighteenth century was an exhilarating age of lively political culture—marked by the rise of libraries and museums, the explosion of the press, and other platforms for public intellectual debates—Draxler and Spratt provide a book that will not only be useful to eighteenth-century scholars, but can also serve as a model for other periods as well. This book will appeal to librarians, archivists, museum directors, scholars, and others interested in digital humanities in the public life. Contributors: Gabriela Almendarez, Jessica Bybee, Nora Chatchoomsai, Gillian Dow, Bridget Draxler, Joan Gillespie, Larisa Good, Elizabeth K. Goodhue, Susan Celia Greenfield, Liz Grumbach, Kellen Hinrichsen, Ellen Jarosz, Hannah Jorgenson, John C. Keller, Naz Keynejad, Stephen Kutay, Chuck Lewis, Nicole Linton, Devoney Looser, Whitney Mannies, Ai Miller, Tiffany Ouellette, Carol Parrish, Paul Schuytema, David Spadafora, Danielle Spratt, Anne McKee Stapleton, Jessica Stewart, Colleen Tripp, Susan Twomey, Nikki JD White, Amy Weldon

The Work of Art in the World

The Work of Art in the World
Author: Doris Sommer
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-01-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0822355868

Celebrating art and interpretation that take on social challenges, Doris Sommer steers the humanities back to engagement with the world. The reformist projects that focus her attention develop momentum and meaning as they circulate through society to inspire faith in the possible. Among the cases that she covers are top-down initiatives of political leaders, such as those launched by Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, and also bottom-up movements like the Theatre of the Oppressed created by the Brazilian director, writer, and educator Augusto Boal. Alleging that we are all cultural agents, Sommer also takes herself to task and creates Pre-Texts, an international arts-literacy project that translates high literary theory through popular creative practices. The Work of Art in the World is informed by many writers and theorists. Foremost among them is the eighteenth-century German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who remains an eloquent defender of art-making and humanistic interpretation in the construction of political freedom. Schiller's thinking runs throughout Sommer's modern-day call for citizens to collaborate in the endless co-creation of a more just and more beautiful world.

Exhibitions for Social Justice

Exhibitions for Social Justice
Author: Elena Gonzales
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351869175

Exhibitions for Social Justice assesses the state of curatorial work for social justice in the Americas and Europe today. Analyzing best practices and new curatorial work to support all those working on exhibitions, Gonzales expounds curatorial practices that lie at the nexus of contemporary museology and neurology. From sharing authority, to inspiring action and building solidarity, the book demonstrates how curators can make the most of visitors’ physical and mental experience of exhibitions. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work at over twenty institutions with nearly eighty museum professionals, as well as scholarship in the public humanities, visual culture, cultural studies, memory studies, and brain science, this project steps back from the detailed institutional histories of how exhibitions come to be. Instead, it builds a set of curatorial practices by examining the work behind the finished product in the gallery. Demonstrating that museums have the power to help our society become more hospitable, equitable, and sustainable, Exhibitions for Social Justice will be of interest to scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will also be valuable reading for museum professionals and anyone else working with exhibitions who is looking for guidance on how to ensure their work attains maximum impact.

Call My Name, Clemson

Call My Name, Clemson
Author: Rhondda Robinson Thomas
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609387414

Between 1890 and 1915, a predominately African American state convict crew built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation in upstate South Carolina. Calhoun’s plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, African Americans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson’s public history. This book traces “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History,” a Clemson English professor’s public history project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution’s complete and complex story from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the twenty-first century. Threading together scenes of communal history and conversation, student protests, white supremacist terrorism, and personal and institutional reckoning with Clemson’s past, this story helps us better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America.

Upward Bound

Upward Bound
Author: Carolyn Partridge
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781947602212

An Ongoing Experiment

An Ongoing Experiment
Author: Elizabeth Lynn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 22
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN: 9780923993528

"In this monograph, author Elizabeth Lynn describes the subsequent creation of state humanities councils, beginning in 1971, as 'an ongoing experiment.' The result has been a continually evolving attempt to work out, on the ground, just what the humanities can and should be to the American public and what kinds of citizens a democracy needs. Lynn writes that the humanities' answer to the latter question has evolved over the past half-century. In the 1950s and 1960s, democracy needed autonomous individuals; in the 1970s, informed voters; the 1980s, prepared pluralists; the 1990s, thoughtful Americans; and the 2000s, engaged citizens." --Kettering Foundation web site

The South Carolina Encyclopedia

The South Carolina Encyclopedia
Author: Walter B. Edgar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1128
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

With nearly 2,000 entries and 520 illustrations, this comprehensive reference surveys the history and culture of the Palmetto State from A to Z, mountains to coast, and prehistory to the present.