Humanities - Programs

Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminars

2003 NEH Summer Seminar: Saying Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry

Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English and a former Humanities Center fellow, was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead a summer 2003 seminar entitled, "Saying Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry." Building on the community connection piece that he developed as a 1999-2000 fellow-a daylong public conference on "The Pleasures of Poetry"-Selinger organized the five-week seminar around topics of interest to elementary through high school teachers.

Eric Selinger

The fifteen participants chosen for the five-week seminar came from a diverse range of public and private, rural and urban, elite and under-funded schools, located from Boston and Nashville to Laredo, Texas and Bakersfield, California. Four days a week, the seminar met to discuss how the pleasures of poetry might be brought to life in the context of such enduring curricular tasks as teaching the art of close reading, the basics of literary history, and the vexed, complex relationships between literature and other disciplines. Conversations integrated theoretical issues and practical, everyday insights into the cultural work of poetry and its place in students' lives both. Participants also inaugurated a "teaching poetry" listserv and researched links and materials for a Teaching of Poetry website, which will be maintained and updated at DePaul.
Highlights of the seminar included visits from three DePaul faculty members. Jonathan Gross, a former Humanities Center fellow, discussed his experiences adapting Byron's Don Juan for dramatic performance at area high schools. Poet Patricia Monaghan, a 2003-2004 fellow, explored the poetry of science, including poems from her new collection Dancing With Chaos. Performance-of-literature specialist Eileen Cherry, a former member of the Humanities Center Executive Committee, led participants in a hands-on workshop on how to use ethnographic research and dramatic analysis to bring a poem's speaker and situation to life.

Eric with seminar participants

By all accounts, the seminar was a great success. As one participant wrote: "The only thing that could make it better would be to make it longer. A year or so might begin to satisfy the curiosity that was awakened as a result of the seminar." With support from the Humanities Center, Selinger will apply to teach the seminar again in the summer of 2005.

2001-2002 NEH Critical Race Theory Seminar
In August 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Humanities Center a Humanities Focus Grant for support of a faculty seminar in Critical Race Theory. Seeking to enrich the intellectual environment of the university and to provide our students with a deeper understanding of how race, class, and ethnicity shape humanistic inquiry, the seminar advanced a substantive discussion of race and ethnicity across a broad range of humanities disciplines. The twenty faculty chosen for the seminar represented fields ranging from geography to philosophy and theatre to law.

Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado

The seminar kicked off in April 2002, and completed the last of its formal sessions in November of the same year. Session topics ranged from the history of race as a concept to critical race globalism. Guest speakers included: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, of the University of Colorado School of Law, authors of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction and Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror; George Fredrickson, of Stanford University, author of Racism: A Short History; Elvia Arriola, of the Northeastern Illinois University School of Law, founder of Women on the Border, Inc.; and Siobhan Somerville, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. The seminar also included spring and summer workshops. The spring workshop brought participants together to discuss the theory of racialization and the development of Critical Race Theory in legal scholarship. During the summer workshop, participants read and discussed one another's works-in-progress, and developed or revised course syllabi based on the work of the seminar.

Elvia Arriola

In addition to shaping the theme and content of our winter 2003 conference, Institutionalizing Multiculturalism at DePaul University, the seminar provided a firm basis for faculty participants to strengthen their research and to take their teaching in new and innovative directions.

George Fredrickson

The impact of the seminar will therefore continue to be felt long after its formal close. As one participant commented during our wrap-up session, "The seminar has highlighted for me the magnitude of the work that still has to be done, but it has also given me tools to go and do that work." Seminar participants have expressed an interest in continuing to share their work-in-progress with one another, and the center will continue to coordinate these meetings. We will also continue to maintain the seminar website and will add resources, including the work of our seminar participants, as they become available.