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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

2026-27: Gender Trouble

Led by Associate Professor of History, Rachel Walker, this seminar explores concepts of gender in the ancient world, early-modern Europe, colonial North America and the contemporary United States. Topics of study and discussion are: how Americans in the past developed and enforced gender roles related to power, “Two Spirit” identities in Indigenous nations, “female husbands” in early America, and modern gender activists. The goal of the seminar is to engage critically with a few main questions: What is gender, anyway? How does it relate to sex? How do societies decide what is “normal” and what is “deviant”? What happens when people buck conventions? And, most importantly, why does it all matter?


  • 2025-26: AI in Action – The Future of Humans
    Faculty Fellow: Amy Weiss, Judaic Studies and History
  • 2024-25: Banned Books and Censorship
    Faculty Fellow: Ayelet Brinn, Judaic Studies and History
  • 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

2026-27 Faculty Fellows

Ellen Carey

Associate Professor of Photography, Ellen Carey (HAS), will present on “Women in Color: Anna Atkins, Color Photography and Those Who Struck Light.” Here, she will explore the work of Anna Atkins, a nineteenth-century botanist and photographer who was the first woman to employ this artform as well as the first person to do photography in color. As such, Professor Carey’s talk will shed light on how women practitioners’ historical and contemporary contributions in color photography have gone under-recognized, unacknowledged and, curiously, not seen as located in gender.

View Faculty Bio

KC Comeforo

Associate Professor of Communication, KC Comeforo (HCA&S), will present on “Daddies, Dandies, and (bull) Daggers: Trans/Queer Performances and the Muddying of the Waters of the Gender Binary.” In this talk/performance, Professor Comeforo will bring the archetypes of “the Daddy,” “the Dandy” and “the Bull Dagger” into conversation with one another as they explore how the existence of queer and trans people in the world creates more equitable ways of thinking about gender.

View Faculty Bio

Jennifer McLeer

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Jennifer McLeer (HCA&S), will present on “Status Violations in Workgroups: What Happens When Women ‘Act Like’ Men?” By looking at theoretical and empirical literature, she will examine how self-promoting and successful women are perceived to violate gendered norms of interaction in ways that challenge and disrupt status hierarchies of prestige and power. Along the way, Professor McLeer will consider how such “status violations” affect cohesion, trust and cooperation within workplace groups.

View Faculty Bio

Amy Weiss

Associate Professor of History, Amy Weiss (HCA&S), will give the talk “When Conservative Ideas on Gender Meet Progressive Cable TV Viewership,” an exploration of the social, ideological and political power dynamics associated with representation of gender on both the Hallmark and Great American Family channels. Here, Professor Weiss will examine how Hallmark, with its featuring of same-sex couples (with varying interpretations of gender) in their moves in recent years, has influenced how GAF has taken a stand for more “traditional values” regarding both politics and gender. Her talk demonstrates how viewer feedback about gender has now only exposed fault lines in cable television, but has been mapped onto network television as well.

View Faculty Bio

2026-27 Student Fellows

  • Olivia Armistead (ENHP, Nursing)
  • Adeline Benvenuto (HAS, Illustration)
  • El Correa (Hartt, Vocal Performance)
  • Elizabeth Edwards (HCA&S, English)
  • Martin Gelly (CETA, Architecture)
  • Diana Isaacs (HCA&S, Psychology)
  • Jack Lowy (HCAS, Psychology)
  • Story McCarty (HAS, Visual Communication Design)
  • Marina Roginskaia (HCA&S, Biology)
  • Gabrielle Stanley (HCA&S, Digital Media & Journalism)
  • Madison Tierney (HCA&S, Biochemistry)
  • Riley Tierney (ENHP, Nursing)
  • Valeriano Valovinos (CETA, Aerospace Engineering)