BiblioVault - Books about Study and teaching (Higher)

Hemispheric American Studies

Levander, Caroline F

Rutgers University Press, 2007

This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.

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A History of Physical Education and Athletics at Oberlin College

Lee C. Drickamer with Frederick D. Shults

The Ohio State University Press, 2022

Since the late nineteenth century, Oberlin College has been a leader in training physical education teachers. The skill and mentoring of founders like Delphine Hanna produced a generation of men and women who were among the most important individuals in the structuring of physical education and in the formation of professional societies in the areas of recreation, athletics, and physical education. Lee C. Drickamer and Frederick D. Shults document the full scope of Oberlin’s physical education and athletics programs, beginning with learning and labor in the mid-nineteenth century and chronicling the evolution of virtually every team, facility, curriculum, societal change, and philosophic stance thereafter. Touching on the mind-body duality, New Physical Education, and the ever-increasing emphasis on winning athletic contests, Drickamer and Shults remind readers of Oberlin’s long history of supporting societal changes and innovation. This process is brought full circle with the current emphasis on health and wellness, again focusing on the mind-body connection.

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Hope Is of a Different Color

From the Global South to the Lodz Film School

Edited by Magda Lipska and Monika Talarczyk

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2020

The history of film students from the Global South who studied in Poland during the Cold War.

As Poland’s second-largest city, Łódź was a hub for international students who studied in Poland from the mid-1960s to 1989. The Łódź Film School, a member of CILECT since 1955, was a favored destination, with students from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East accounting for one-third of its international student body. Despite the school’s international reputation, the experience of its filmmakers from the Global South is little known beyond Poland.

Hope Is of a Different Color addresses the history of student exchanges between the Global South and the Polish People’s Republic during the Cold War. It sheds light on the experiences and careers of a generation of young filmmakers at Łódź, many of whom went on to achieve success as artists in their home countries, and provides insight into emerging areas of research and race relations in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays reflect on these issues from multiple perspectives, considering sociology, political science, art, and film history. The book also features previously unpublished photographs and film stills from private archives along with visual and written material collected at the Łódź Film School.

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Hospitality and Authoring

An Essay for the English Profession

Richard Haswell

Utah State University Press, 2015

Hospitality and Authoring, a sequel to the Haswells’ 2010 volume Authoring, attempts to open the path for hospitality practice in the classroom, making a strong argument for educational use and offering an initial map of the territory for teachers and authors.

Hospitality is a social and ethical relationship not only between host and guest but also between writer and reader or teacher and student. Hospitality initiates, maintains, and completes acts of authoring. This extended essay explores the ways that a true hospitable classroom community can be transformed through assigned reading, one-on-one conferencing, interpretation, syllabus, reading journals, topic choice, literacy narrative, writing centers, program administration, teacher training, and many other passing habitations.

Hospitality and Authoring strives to offer a few possibilities of change to help make college an institution where singular students and singular teachers create a room to learn with room to learn.

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How to Make Art at the End of the World

A Manifesto for Research-Creation

Natalie Loveless

Duke University Press, 2019

In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.

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The Humanities and the Dream of America

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today’s humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrument of American national interests. The humanities portray a “dream of America” in two senses: they represent an aspiration of Americans since the first days of the Republic for a state so secure and prosperous that people could enjoy and appreciate culture for its own sake; and they embody in academic terms an idealized conception of the American national character. Although they are struggling to retain their status in America, the concept of the humanities has spread to other parts of the world and remains one of America's most distinctive and valuable contributions to higher education.

The Humanities and the Dream of America explores a number of linked problems that have emerged in recent years: the role, at once inspiring and disturbing, played by philology in the formation of the humanities; the reasons for the humanities’ perpetual state of “crisis”; the shaping role of philanthropy in the humanities; and the new possibilities for literary study offered by the subject of pleasure. Framed by essays that draw on Harpham’s pedagogical experiences abroad and as a lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as well as his vantage as director of the National Humanities Center, this book provides an essential perspective on the history, ideology, and future of this important topic.

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The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth

Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Christina Lux

Northwestern University Press, 2019

The essays in The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth represent a defense of the social function of the humanities in today's society. Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Christina Lux, the volume explains different ways in which the humanities and the arts, beyond their intrinsic and nonfunctional value, may be a valuable tool in our search for social justice, human empathy, freedom, and peace, all the while helping us answer many of the twenty-first century's big questions. Some essays explore the ways in which the humanities may help us imagine a different, more just world, and articulate politically effective mechanisms to achieve such goals. Others address the place of the humanities and the arts amid the ontological and epistemological uncertainties constantly produced in a fast-changing world.

While the reader may suspect that these types of lucubration are a desperate reaction to decreased public funding for the humanities worldwide, a decreased enrollment of students, or anxiety over the future of our profession, there is in this volume a coherent argument for the continued need, perhaps more now than ever, to invest in humanities education if we are to have informed and socially conscious citizens rather than just willing consumers and obedient workers. Furthermore, the essays prove that the humanities and the arts are, after all, not a luxury but an integral part of a complete scholarly education.

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