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The Humanities Center

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For more information, contact Humanities Center Director Nicholas Ealy, Professor of English and Modern Languages.

The Humanities Center at the University of Hartford embodies a decades-long commitment to the humanities from UHart scholars in literature, languages, history (including art and music history), philosophy, cinema, rhetoric, creative writing and the communication arts.

About Us

The Humanities Center aims to provide greater visibility for the humanities at UHart and to furnish venues for interdisciplinary exchanges across the humanities and the arts, sciences, technology, media, music, psychology, film, philosophy, history, and literature. It was founded in the University’s College of Arts and Sciences through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

What We Do

Year-Long Honors Seminars

Each year, the Humanities Center sponsors a year-long honors seminar featuring a topic chosen and taught by a full-time Faculty Fellow. Students of high achievement, from across all programs of study, can apply to take the honors seminar and become a Student Fellow.  Student Fellows are eligible to receive a $500 scholarship once accepted to the honors seminar.

Spring Lecture Series

The Humanities Center also sponsors a lecture series that is open to the public each spring and is based on the topic of the honors seminar. Up to four University of Hartford full-time faculty, chosen as Faculty Fellows of the center, speak in the lecture series. The remaining speakers are both on- and off-campus experts on subjects related to that year’s topic.  

Honors Seminar Topics

2024-25: Banned Books and Censorship

Led by Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History Ayelet Brinn, this seminar examines the history and politics of banning, censoring, and burning books, both in the United States and abroad. Reflected most recently in the rise in book banning in schools and libraries, censorship tends to focus on texts that stretch social boundaries in their depictions of race, sexuality, politics, gender, religion, and science. Students will study banned books and censored materials within their historical context, compare and contrast the treatment of different texts across time and space, and examine the relationship between power, culture, and literacy in society. Students will also engage with banned texts (e.g., writings by Galileo, Darwin, Judy Blume) and the history of censorship (e.g., the Espionage Act of 1917, the Hays Code, Supreme Court decisions) while developing strategies for critically analyzing the arguments made for and against such censoring.

Seven UHart Humanities Center Faculty Fellows will speak on selected Wednesdays from 5–6  p.m. in spring 2025.

 


  • 2023-24: Fiction, Fabulation, Futurity
    Faculty Fellow: Rashmi Viswanathan, Art History
  • 2022-23: Decolonizing the University: Ethnic Studies through Time
    Faculty Fellow: Karen Tejada, Sociology
  • 2021-22: Fearing the Unknown – Irrationality, Anti-Politics, and Conspiracy Theories
    Faculty Fellow: Marco Cupolo, Hispanic Studies
  • 2020-21: Lights, Camera, Activism!
    Faculty Fellow:  Mala Matacin, Psychology 
  • 2019-20: Transversing Gender, Race, and Class
    Faculty Fellow: Kristin Comeforo, Communication
  • 2018-19: Evidence in a Post-Truth World
    Faculty Fellow: Lauren Cook, Cinema
  • 2017-18: The Secular and the Spiritual
    Faculty Fellow: Richard Freund, Judaic Studies
  • 2016-17: Our Monsters, Ourselves
    Faculty Fellow: Amanda Walling, English and Modern Languages
  • 2015-16: Remembering 9/11
    Faculty Fellow: Sarah Senk, English and Modern Languages

2024-25 Faculty Fellows

Fran Altvater

Associate Professor of Art History Fran Altvater (Hillyer College), will give a talk titled “From Fig Leaves to Full Facial Obliteration: Censorship from Within Christianity.” Here, she will turn toward specific examples of censorship from within the Christian community (e.g., Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment”) as a means of removing some of the perceived power of the imagery. Occurring at moments of tension in the theology and history of Christianity in a given area, this talk will be a meditation on the idea of proper visual expressions regarding theological material and their force in shaping the art of these faith communities.

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Karen Lucas Breda

Associate Professor of Nursing Karen Lucas Breda (ENHP), will speak on the “Ideology of Bans and Censorship with Travesti and Trans Women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” This project aims to examine Brazilian travesti and trans women, understudied groups mostly existing on the margins of society, regarding social censorship with respect to changing gender, sexuality, religious and racial considerations.

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Woody Doane

Professor of Sociology Woody Doane (Hillyer College) will present on his scholarship “Critical Race Theory: The Latest Battleground in the Defense of White Supremacy.” In this talk, he will address how the recent politicized campaigns against “critical race theory” and the attempts to ban DEI programs are part of a “new white nationalism,” conceptualized to maintain white dominance in the face of challenges from antiracist social movements.

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Maria Esposito Frank

Professor of Italian Studies Maria Esposito Frank (A&S) will give a talk titled “Radical Censorial Interventions: The Case of the Decameron.” Here, she will examine how Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterwork the Decameron, a collection of 100 novellas, has been subjected to bans, condemnation and censorship – almost since its appearance – due to content deemed blasphemous, sexually explicit, and critical of the Church.

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Susan Grantham

Professor of Communication Susan Grantham (A&S) will speak on “The Suppression and Sequestration of Creative Non-Fiction” concerning environmental studies. Beginning with a discussion of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962), which changed the trajectory of environmental awareness in the United States, this talk will examine how tactics of deregulation and the undermining of scientific policy over the past 50+ years have led to the suppression and censorship of environmental science information and communication.

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Rashmi Viswanathan

Assistant Professor of Art History Rashmi Viswanathan (Hartford Art School) will address the recent controversies surrounding the display of the Pakistan-born artist Shahzia Sikander’s “Witness,” which was put on exhibition on the campus of the University of Houston’s Cullen Family Plaza of Public Art. The work, an exploration of feminine archetypes and their embodiment in South Asian and other artistic iconographies that honor a feminist present and potential future, has been deemed as blasphemous and “promoting child sacrifice” by the Texas Right to Life organization.

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2024-25 Student Fellows

  • Lydia Balas (English and Psychology, A&S)
  • Madalyn Behrmann (Psychology, A&S)
  • Shaynah Castro (Politics, A&S)
  • Augustus Cullivan (Clarinet, Hartt)
  • Hailey D'Alessio (Art History, HAS)
  • Niyah Davis (Education, Hillyer/ENHP)
  • Alicia Farr (Architecture, CETA)
  • Melina Haynes (Biology, A&S)
  • Diego Huaman (History, A&S)
  • Olivia Jascot (English, A&S)
  • Rhiannon Lara (Biology, A&S)
  • Ilan Sperber (General Studies, A&S)
  • Finn Stigliano (Studio Art, HAS)
  • Ariel Wright (Communication, A&S)
  • Jiani Zuo (Illustration, HAS)