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Call for Student Fellows for the 2023-24 Humanities Center Seminar

February 06, 2023
Submitted By: Nicholas Ealy

The Humanities Center is accepting applications for Student Fellows for next year’s seminar. Students with a minimum of a 3.0 grade point average who will be sophomores, juniors, or seniors in the 2023-24 academic year are eligible to participate in the Humanities Center as Student Fellows. You do not need to be an honors student to apply.

Applications are due by Monday, April 3. See the attached letter for information on how to apply.

As a Fellow, you will attend a two-semester honors seminar based on a theme. Rashmi Viswanathan, Assistant Professor of Art History, will lead the Humanities Center Seminar next year. She has selected the theme of “Fiction, Fabulation, Futurity” for the seminar. Here you will get to know some of the brightest students at the University of Hartford. You will also attend lectures by both university faculty and visiting speakers who are doing research on this theme. Here is a description of the seminar:

This class will examine how artists and writers have used fictional stories to reimagine the future of human existence in ways that involve new concepts of race, ethnicity, class, sex and gender. Along the way, you will explore how these “reimagined futures” raise questions regarding how we think about these concepts in our contemporary “real world.” To help with this, you will study artists and writers who have recreated ideas of place (such as Sun Ra and Gloria Anzaldúa), you will read novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, you will watch films and television episodes (such as Whale Rider and the Watchmen), examine concepts like future urban design, the human body as a cosmos, and much more. For the final project, you will curate an imagined exhibition – where you envision a future world of your own – based on a topic of your choice.

The Fall semester will be a traditional discussion-centered seminar-style class. The Spring semester will be a series of lectures by faculty members and visiting speakers on the topic of “Fiction, Fabulation, Futurity.”

Students who are selected for this seminar are awarded a fellowship, receive a stipend of at least $500 and take the seminar for a total of six credits, three in the fall term and three in the spring term.* The courses are listed as HON 389 in the fall 2023 schedule and HON 390 in the spring 2024 schedule. The class meets both semesters on Monday evenings, 5 p.m. – 7:20 p.m., and student fellows must take both semesters.