Civic Literacy Partnerships
The Humanities Center construes literacy broadly to include not only reading, but also the broader realm of arts and letters, the study of institutions and cultures, and historical and cultural knowledge that can serve as a foundation for civic engagement. Study in the humanities fosters an informed citizenry, capable of critical thought, knowledgeable of the historical and cultural context in which they are operating, and ready to contribute meaningfully as knowledgeable members of a democracy. Toward these ends, this program creates partnerships with community or city organizations, such as libraries, museums, and theatres, which serve as the urban and public voices for the humanities.
Chicago Humanities Festival
Chicago is home to a large and successful public humanities festival, which brings a rich array of humanities programming to the city over a two-week period each fall. As part of our sponsorship of this festival, each year the Humanities Center hosts a session of the Festival's Classics in Context program, a series of workshops for Chicago school teachers designed to provide multiple perspectives on a single text. Our faculty have taught workshops on such texts as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the literary originals behind the Disney films Beauty and the Beast and Pinocchio. Most recently, in October 2003, we hosted a session on Dante's Inferno, led by Gary Cestaro, Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages. We also served as host in 2003 to the Festival's annual Creative Writing Seminar, which welcomed forty students from Prosser Career Academy and Hubbard High School to work with poet and writer Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa, and Bosnian writer and archeologist Mirsad Sijaric.
Pictures from this year's Classics in Context:
click to view slideshow
Chicago Public Library
In 2001, Mayor Richard M. Daley implemented a citywide book club, "One Book, One Chicago," a program in conjunction with Chicago Public Library that invites the entire city, twice each year, to read and join in discussions and programming on a selected book. In 2002, DePaul University partnered with the Chicago Public Library through our Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program to offer two sections of a graduate course entitled "Chicago's One Book: Issues and Perspectives." To extend the reach of this partnership, in October 2003, the Humanities Center offered the first in a regular series of One Book, One Chicago seminars for high school teachers. The seminar, on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, was led by David Jolliffe, Associate Professor of English. The next seminar will take place in spring of 2004.