Humanities Initiatives for Faculty: Historically Black Colleges and Universities

With a Humanities Initiatives for Faculty award, a faculty member at a Historically Black College will orchestrate a series of activities, including faculty workshops and public lectures, that incorporates current research on James Weldon Johnson, one of the best-known figures of the Harlem Renaissance. As a writer and musician, Johnson explored Black gospel music and sermons in the theatrical production All God's Trombones. He also had a career in politics and as a diplomat. The project will include presentations on Johnson's artistic works, a faculty forum examining Johnson's non-fiction work Black Manhattan, and a lecture and a workshop focused on Johnson's appointment to consular posts in Venezuela and Nicaragua. The workshop will include materials drawn from his diplomatic career for use in a Spanish class. The faculty will prepare an interdisciplinary course on Johnson and the Harlem Renaissance.

Faculty from a wide range of humanities disciplines, such as world history, Middle Eastern studies, English, foreign languages, Asian studies, art history, and music, will hold a series of twelve seminar meetings over the course of the academic year to examine the nature of epic literature. Participants will read major epic works in their entirety, or, as appropriate, selections from them. In the seminars, participants might read texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, the Niebelungenlied, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Firdausi's Shanahmah, the Chanson de Roland, El Cid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Joyce's Ulysses, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Topics of special focus will include critical approaches to understanding oral and written epic, the nature of the epic hero, techniques of epic narrative, and the enduring impact of epic on culture and national consciousness. As appropriate, participants will report on classic critical works, such as Alfred Lord's Singer of Tales and C. S. Lewis's preface to Paradise Lost. Visiting scholars from other colleges and universities will enhance the faculty seminars, and participants will discuss ways in which they might incorporate their studies into their ongoing teaching and research. The budget will include funds to acquire a core collection of epic literature for the college library.

Faculty at a Historically Black College plan to launch an initiative to integrate the study of language with the study of history, literature, and the arts in Europe and in European colonial societies. Faculty members teaching Spanish, French, and German will confer with their colleagues in a year-long series of monthly workshops to identify a sequence of thematically connected texts in each language. These texts would encourage students to explore the cultural dimension of learning a language as they progress beyond the elementary level of proficiency. Teachers of history and the arts will develop related materials in order to set the stage for a dialogue with the teachers of foreign languages and literatures. Initial workshops will focus on the Reformation era, the impact of Renaissance humanist scholarship, and reflections on encounters in the New World. The language teachers will interpret for their colleagues thematically appropriate passages in German from Martin Luther, in Spanish from the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, and in French from Michel de Montaigne. Toward the end of the study project, one of the workshops will focus on the colonial societies created under European rule and the process of decolonization. For this workshop participants will read texts written in their original language, among them Nuestra America and other writings by José Martí, Les petits bouts de bois de dieu by Ousmane Sembene, and recent writings by Germans who immigrated to Africa.

Faculty members from a Historically Black University's Division of Medical Science will revise "Introduction to Clinical Medicine," a required core course, so that it integrates humanities texts and methods of narrative analysis. Over the course of an academic year, faculty will read primary texts such as Aristotle's The Nicomachaean Ethics, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Resident Patient," Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and John Cheever's "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," coupled with secondary works, including Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History, Kathryn Montgomery-Hunter's Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and M.C. McEntyre's Teaching Literature and Medicine; and Rita Charon and Martha Montello's Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. Toward the end of the year, faculty will develop learning modules in which literary stories are used to teach communication skills required for interviewing people from various walks of life in clinical settings. A guest scholar, who teaches literature and medicine at another university, will meet periodically with the working group to review the development of the modules.