ASU Humanities Institute

This Monday, the Humanities Institute is hosting the second part of a series of panels discussing cultural appropriation and what it means to think, research, and write across cultures and ways of being.

We are excited to welcome our speakers Ruben Espinosa, a Professor of English at ASU and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), and Curtis Austin, our acting Director this semester and a historian in SHPRS.

Stop by the institute on Monday at 4pm for an opportunity to hear from our wonderful speakers!

The Q***r X Humanities initiative is a great way to connect our community of scholars as we explore varying forms of knowledge across disciplines through q***r, trans*, and sexuality studies.

The “X” acts as a symbol of bridging, crossing, and transition for the work of this initiative as it critiques power and builds intellectual spaces and social movements.

Our initiative directors are Julia Himberg, the Associate Chair of English and Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at ASU, and Sa Whitley, an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies at the ASU School of Social Transformation. Together they are leading this initiative to situate ASU as a knowledge hub in the Southwest for Q***r Studies, Transgender Studies, and Sexuality Studies.

With Fall 2024 events for this initiative on the horizon, make sure to check out our website https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/q***r-x-humanities to stay up to date on the latest Q***r X Humanities events!

The Humanities Institute is proud to welcome this initiative to our space!

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Join us Thursday evening for a talk with Michael Davidson on his most recent book, “Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error”, which is about the role of deafness and disability in contemporary aesthetics, and how physical and intellectual differences challenge generic terms for art and poetry.

In this talk, Professor Davidson will reflect upon the ways Distressing Language grew out of the author’s experience of hearing loss, in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence, not as a deficit but as a gain.

This event is hosted by our Health Humanities Initiative. We would love to see you there!

Yesterday we welcomed the start of our new Q***r X Humanities Initiative! We got the opportunity to hear from our wonderful initiative co-directors, Sa Whitley and Julia Himberg, who discussed future directions of community-building, research, and opportunities for open discussion under this new initiative.

Thank you to everyone who attended! If you are curious or want to learn more about this initiative, visit our website https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/q***r-x-humanities for up-to-date information on Q***r X Humanities.

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Come join the Humanities Institute for the inaugural event of the Q***r X Initiative! Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the goals of the initiative, interact with our faculty (as well as our initiative co-directors Sa Whitley and Julia Himberg) and share ideas and insights!

The meet and greet will take place from 4-5pm on Thursday, September 5th.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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This semester, the Humanities Institute is hosting two panels on appropriation, examining ethical dilemmas such as: what constitutes cultural appropriation and when is it unethical? This panel is going to discuss what it means to think, research, and write across cultures and ways of being.

This first panel will be held by Ayanna Thompson, an author and a scholar of Shakespeare, race, and performance, and Cristóbal Martinez, an artist in the interdisciplinary artist collective Postcommodity.

The event is going to be hosted at the Humanities Institute, RBH196 in the Ross-Blakley Hall on the Tempe campus, Tuesday 9/3 from 4pm to 5pm. We would love to see you there!

Check out our events tab on our website for more information!

No matter what your significant project is, the Writing Studio can provide you with the tools to build good writing habits in a supportive environment. Most meeting time will be spent writing, with short intervals to develop strategies for meeting deadlines and overcoming obstacles.

Christopher Jones, who has four years of experience with writing workshops, will be facilitating these events.

In-person attendance will be limited to 35 people, so make sure RSVP soon!

Come by this free event to work on your writing habits, meet other writers, and enjoy some coffee!

Visit https://asuevents.asu.edu/event/writing-studio-chris-jones-fall-2024-series-sprint?id=0 to RSVP!

Due to environmental evolution and climate change, communities have increasingly been having to deal with challenges such as increased heat, changing weather patterns, and issues with water access.

With all of this in mind, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is leveraging our desert home to research and address local concerns and creating a hub for interdisciplinary solutions.

Jason Bruner, the Director of the Desert Humanities Initiative, spoke about its goals, “...I want the Desert Humanities Initiative be a place for students, faculty, and the broader community to inquire in these complex, interrelated issues, to see them in their historical and cultural contexts and to consider new possibilities for more just and desirable futures.”

For more information on the truly exceptional projects, publications, and community engagements of the Desert Humanities Initiative, please visit our website https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/initiatives/desert-humanities

As a concept, sport enables an interdisciplinary investigation into social, economic, political and cultural elements of societies as well as the complexities, contradictions, and liberations that get to the heart of the human condition.

The Sports @ HI Initiative supports work that provides solutions to complex problems facing the sports world, with emphasis on sports institutions as well as the broader societies that sporting spaces reflect and influence. It also allows opportunities to create new knowledge through collaborative research seminars and public events.

The initiative directors are Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and a clinical associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at ASU, Shawn Klein, an editor who specializes in ethics, popular culture, and the philosophy of sport, and Terry Shoemaker, a qualitative research scholar focusing on religious change in contemporary life in the US.

For more information on the initiative, visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/initiatives/Sports-HI

Interested in the history of the ninja? Check out the Critical Ninja Theory newsletter by Rob Tuck, an academic at ASU who works on Japanese literature and history.

Ninja are commonly understood as a group of spies in Japanese history, who used specialized weapons like shuriken and shadowy tactics in specialized assassinations. But, as Tuck uncovers the literature and history surrounding shinobi, it’s clear that the ninja is better understood as a literary construct rather than a historical one.

The Critical Ninja Theory newsletter is an engaging look into our understanding of the ninja in pop culture and how it was shaped by storytelling over time. Looking at historical fiction, the study of historical weapons, and so much more, Rob Tuck is able to create a captivating chronicle of what ninja really were and how we got to our current understanding.

Last year Rob Tuck received a Seed Grant from the Humanities Institute which went towards his research and newsletter on ninja history and culture.

Stay updated on the latest articles in the Critical Ninja Theory substack at https://criticalninjatheory.substack.com/

The Health Humanities at HI Initiative pays attention to the narratives, values, and cultural products and institutions relating to health that human communities create and uphold.

Health Humanities at HI includes researchers working in the established fields of narrative medicine, bioethics, philosophy of science, biocultural studies, history of medicine, translation studies, and disability studies. It also supports those who are focused on reforming healthcare training and practice and working to promote structural awareness, diversity and cultural humility in the health professions.

The initiative directors are Cora Fox, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at ASU, and Annika Mann, a scholar of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature and culture, with special interest in the history of medicine, health humanities, and disability studies.

For more information, visit
https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/Health-Humanities-at-HI

The Blue Humanities Initiative at the Humanities Institute brings together the expertise of scholars in the College of Liberal Arts to examine our understanding of the relationship between humankind and the ocean in the present, past and future.

The Blue Humanities Initiative Director is Sir Jonathan Bate, a Regents and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Global Futures.

This initiative is in collaboration with the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, which has recently become part of ASU’s Global Futures Laboratory ( ), ASU’s Hawaii-based Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, and in partnership with researchers at King’s College, London.

For more information on the Blue Humanities Initiative, visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/blue-humanities

The Humanities Institute has a variety of initiatives which help to constantly inspire engagement with our larger communities. They bring people together to engage in meaningful conversations that help to build understanding and develop further curiosity in the research community!

Exploring the various ways that theory shows up in the world, the Applied Theory initiative examines various forms of knowledge production and seeks to reconnect the theoretical humanities to the communities that they hope to serve.

This initiative is directed by Stacey Moran, an Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the English Department at ASU.

Our Mission Statement acts as a reflection of our work as well as a supportive force for our future endeavors here at the Humanities Institute.

We foster connections at the level of the university and beyond— celebrating the best of what the Humanities can accomplish across culture, time, and space.

Now that we have had the opportunity to look at our other 2024-2025 HI Seed Grant projects, let’s take a look at our final project!

Decades of research have shown that exposure to parental conflict predicts poor outcomes for children across family structures, socioeconomic status and cultural and geographical lines. Children exposed to parental conflict are more likely to develop mental and physical health problems. A gameplay experience in which the “bad guys” are identified and battled has been shown to have powerful transformative effects post trauma. The open question is: as the children identify the “bad guys” and see themselves as the “secret identity” that gathers allies and activates power-ups—will the imaginative play in the game have a transformative effect?

This seed grant will fund research and grant applications for a book project, “The Civil Wars of Jacob D. Green,” which explores the social, political, existential, critical theoretical and literary dimensions of this formerly enslaved American’s struggles as a freedom fighter, abolitionist and antiracist speaker. The main output will be a book, public-facing articles and collaborations across disciplines at ASU and internationally. Green was born enslaved in Maryland, rebelled repeatedly, sojourned in Canada and lectured in England from 1863 until his 1866 death. His 1864 autobiography is an extraordinary literary achievement, but much of Green’s life remains a mystery.

Another look at one of our seed grant projects!

This project aims to offer a comprehensive study of a group of Buddhist and Daoist liturgical manuscripts preserved in the Hsu Collection, one of the largest private collections of Chinese and Southeast Asian texts in Asia. Besides identifying, cataloging and digitizing these religious manuscripts, this project examines the locality and hybridity in the Sino-Vietnamese religious culture. It will help reveal the significance of this group of religious texts that lies in the international network of Chinese Buddhism and Daoism in the 17th to 19th centuries as well as the locality and hybridity of religious practice in Southeast Asia.

The community at large holds the power to influence change (“We The People”), and individual action is the most powerful way to achieve it. The collective action of community listening helps raise awareness of the environment in which we live, the impact we have on it, and the transformations we observe in it. Here and now. This is a catalyst for change.

Environmental listening is a simple tool that can profoundly strengthen these very sensibilities. The practice of environmental listening makes us more aware of our place within the ecosystem and, perhaps uniquely, brings us into the now, the very moment of practice.

This proposal outlines a new initiative to establish a community-embedded Environmental Listening Network that teaches environmental listening skills and conducts listening events free to the community. Using a network of key partnerships, including ASU Library and the National Library Network, it aims to share this simple yet powerful method of environmental engagement nationally and worldwide. An Environmental Listening Field Guide is in development for broad distribution.This approach addresses several challenges. The first is that the time commitment and financial commitment associated with engaging in environmental listing and building local communities are minimal. All socio-economic groups can engage in these activities equally. Environmental listening can be practiced daily, wherever the listener finds themselves. So doing so helps develop an awareness of the subtleties of the ecosystem in which we live. As individual action is increasingly amplified by social media, the empowerment of individuals is one of the most powerful ways forward. Environmental Listening is an effective strategy for bringing about these changes and a key tool in addressing climate impact. The Community Environmental Listening Project envisions a future where, through acoustic ecology, people embrace their presence on the land on which they live to understand and foster a balanced ecosystem.

Another one of our seed grant projects!

This project investigates the medieval East Asian interethnic relations and perspectives portrayed in the fifteenth-century Korean travelogue, “A Record of Drifting across the Sea,” written by the Korean official Ch’oe Pu (1454-1504). Focusing on ethnographic findings during Ch’oe’s inadvertent travel to Ming China (1368-1644), it explores cultural and ethnic sensitivities and boundaries—permeated as they were with stereotyping and generalizations—both within China and between China and Korea and beyond. By showing the variability and complexity of identify formation through interethnic and cross-cultural contacts, it illustrates the flexibility and plurality of ethnicity across medieval East Asia, an important but seriously understudied subject.

The Humanities Institute seed grant program supports humanities-based projects that engage with social challenges in the past, present, or future.
Over the next few days, we will be looking at a few of our current seed grant projects!

This project offers pioneering empirical research on the impact of humanities education - and specifically, intensive language and culture learning - on college students’ cultural fluency and global mindset. Using ASU’s nationally-recognized Critical Languages Institute (CLI) as a research laboratory (with IRB approval and informed consent of research subjects), the research will deploy two instruments that assess students’ capacities for understanding how culture shapes their own and others’ decisions and behavior (the Beliefs, Events and Values Inventory assessment (BEVI); and students’ capacities for understanding the components of effective cross-cultural leadership (The Global Mindset Inventory).

Congratulations to Jo Guldi whose “The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights” published by is this year’s HI Book Award Winner.

The book award celebrates outstanding writers whose contributions to the humanities change the conversation by fostering new directions.

Dr. Curtis Austin, associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the School of Social Transformation and associate director of the Humanities, lauds Dr. Guldi’s work, commenting that the 2024 HI Book Award committee was “impressed with the book’s accessibility and interdisciplinary intervention on a topic of such social and cultural importance. In addition, the committee was equally intrigued to see how adept Dr. Guldi has been at expanding horizons and focusing on the ways in which text mining helps ordinary citizens make sense of algorithms that treat ‘humanists’ concerns about the bias of sources and historians’ concerns for the modeling of temporal experience.’” Dr. Austin added, like Dr. Guldi, ASU believes we can “keep data in the liberal arts and do it well.”

The annual HI Book Award ceremony will be held this fall. Details soon. Congratulations again, Dr. Guldi and !

Write in community, Right Now. The HI Writing Studio continues with its summer-intensive “Sprint” series every Tuesday and Thursday, 9:15 a.m. to 12 p.m. Join to engage intentionally and strengthen your approach to writing a complete a project before summer’s even at the halfway mark. Refreshments at each meeting. Register via

The IHR will be closing at 12 p.m. on November 22nd. ASU and the IHR will be closed on Thursday, November 23rd and Friday, November 24th in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. We wish you a safe and happy break!

Congratulations to the IHR's Desert Humanities initiative for receiving the Bernard "Bill" Benson Research Award . This project will develop a highly interdisciplinary online undergraduate course at Arizona State University on the history, ecology, geology, and botany of Boyce Thompson Arboretum (BTA), and the area proximate to Superior, Arizona.

Bernard “Bill” Benson was an alumnus of ASU and was the first curator and assistant director of BTA. Benson was an early proponent of sustainability and conservation, and was passionate and committed to promoting science and nature to individuals of all ages.

The mission of Boyce Thompson Arboretum is to inspire appreciation and stewardship of desert plants, wildlife, and ecosystems through research. In support of that mission, BTA frequently hosts individuals who conduct important research onsite through the establishment of the Bernard "Bill" Benson Research Award, in collaboration with Arizona State University.

Jason Bruner, Desert Humanities director, is the principal investigator (PI) on the project, along with co-PIs Evan Berry (SHPRS), Steve Semken (School of Earth and Space Exploration), Regents Professor Sir Jonathan Bate (English), Erika Hansen (School of Art), and Luke Ramsey (School of Sustainability).

Apply for the award at https://thecollege.asu.edu/fellowships/benson

ASU School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies ASU Department of English ASU School of Art School of Sustainability

Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, November 14th from 4 to 5:30 p.m. (MST) at RBH196 (ASU Tempe campus) for "How to Apply and Make the Most of Fellowship Programs," with Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and Robert Newman, president & director of the National Humanities Center (NHC). RBH196 or virtual.

NHC offers everything from one year to one-month summer fellowships. ACLS offers a range of grants and fellowships for individuals and groups of scholars. The event will include remarks from each president, time for questions and an informal reception afterward.

For more information and to register, click below.

How to Apply and Make the Most of Fellowship Programs | ASU Events A conversation with Joy Connolly and Robert Newman Do you love applying for fellowships and want to learn about more opportunities to do so? Do you dread applying for fellowships and need encouragement? All are welcome at this discussion.

ASU and the Institute for Humanities Research will be closed in observance of Veteran's Day on Friday, November 10th. The IHR will be closing early on Thursday, at 3 p.m. and we will resume normal business hours on Monday, November 13th.

Have a safe weekend!

Join U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023, for a conversation on how connectedness can improve our well-being and combat the epidemic of loneliness.

ASU students are invited to attend this live event at the Memorial Union, Arizona Ballroom on Tempe campus. Visit provost.asu.edu/madetoconnect to learn more and register to attend.

When: Monday, Nov. 13, 2023, 4:30-6 p.m.
Where: Memorial Union, Arizona Ballroom on Tempe campus
Website: provost.asu.edu/madetoconnect

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Join us today, Tuesday, November 7th from 12 to 1 p.m. at Durham Hall, room 240, 851 S. Cady Mall (ASU's Tempe campus) to learn how to apply for and lead an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Institute.

In this event, a roundtable of ASU faculty who have received this grant will walk us through the process of applying and the things they learned from leading a summer institute. Free!

Learn how to translate your scholarship for wide audiences and place work in high-impact, public-facing venues. Join us as veteran editors Torie Bosch and Andrés Martinez guide us through all the steps from making a pitch to publication. Join us at 10 a.m. today!

Writing for a Public Audience with Torie Bosch and Andrés Martinez | ASU Events Writing for a Public Audience with Torie Bosch and Andrés Martinez Learn how to translate your scholarship for wide audiences and place work in high-impact, public-facing venues. Join us as veteran editors Torie Bosch and Andrés Martinez guide us through all the steps from making a pitch to public...

ASU faculty! Join us tomorrow for "U.S. Embassy Grants: How to Identify, Apply, Win, and Implement the State Department's International Public Diplomacy Grants" on October31, 10:30 a.m. - 12 p.m. at Durham Hall #240 (Tempe campus) and get a grant!

U.S. Embassy Grants: How to Identify, Apply, Win, and Implement the State Department's International Public Diplomacy Grants | ASU Events The Public Affairs Sections at U.S. embassies around the world have annual budgets to fund publicly-facing artistic, academic, and cultural events that they open to public competition each year. These Public Diplomacy Small Grants reflect each embassy's particular priorities for that year but genera...