Humanities

The Department of Health has received over 300 complaints from detainees about the facility’s conditions. A state law meant to give state agencies more oversight is tied up in court. Angelina Godoy, professor of law, societies and justice and of international studies and director of the Center for Human Rights at the UW, is quoted.

A group of Arts & Sciences faculty known as the Dean’s Academy Futurists are  imagining what higher education might look like after 2050 and envisioning new models for the liberal arts

"Asian communities in Washington are changing, and our state’s century-old Asian languages department must change as well. Comparison of the U.S. 2020 Census results with the previous 2010 Census demonstrates that Asian demographics in our state and region are undergoing dramatic changes," writes Zev Handel, professor and department chair of Asian languages and literature at the UW.

You don’t interrupt your quiet life in a Seattle suburb and book a plane ticket to war-torn Sudan unless you have a really good reason. Not right now, in the middle of a brutal conflict between rival forces that’s killed more than 12,000 people and displaced 7 million. Christopher Tounsel, associate professor of history at the UW, is quoted.

“Almost 80 million people speak Telugu,” says Hanuma Kodavalla. “Not many people know its richness as a language and culture.” He and his wife recently established the Hanuma and Anuradha Kodavalla Endowed Chair in Telugu at the UW, providing an invaluable investment in the College of Arts & Sciences and Department of Asian Languages & Literature. 

In collaboration with the UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee, award-winning poet and UW assistant professor Piotr Florczyk dedicated an event to the reading and discussion of poetry in Polish and English. Contributing writer Avery Cook dives into the importance of bilingual writing and writers.

“Killers of the Flower Moon," the 2017 true crime book, and its new feature film adaptation, shine a light on the conspiracy to murder Osage people for their oil rights in early 1920s Oklahoma. Jean Dennison, associate professor of American Indian Studies at the UW, is interviewed.

When you hear a cover of a favorite song, comparisons are inevitable. There are obvious similarities – the lyrics, the melody – but there are also enough differences to make each version unique. Those deviations say more than you might expect. Maya Angela Smith, associate professor of French, introduces translation studies through the lens of the song "Ne Me Quitte Pas."

An empty wallet, a hairbrush, a diaper. These are just a few of the items left behind by migrants at the United States-Mexico border, photographed for a 2021 article in the Los Angeles Times. In this episode, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies Diana Ruíz discusses how the same images can be used on both sides of the same debate. In this case, pro- and anti-immigration.

Who gets to be a superhero? What about a villain? It depends on where you look. In the 1940s, comic book villains were often distinguished from heroes through physical disability. That changed in the 1960s and 70s, when it became more common for heroes to be built around disability. In this episode, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures José Alaniz analyzes the physical depictions of superheroes and villains through the decades.

Picture a series of uniform mounds of earth, each about 6-feet high. Enclosing 50 acres, the mounds form an octagon that is connected to a circle. This is The Octagon Earthworks, located in central Ohio, and it’s one of thousands of Indigenous mounds across the eastern half of North America. Chadwick Allen is a professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Washington, and he studies Native American earthworks and cultural erasure.

Centuries ago, writers depicted the natural world as terrifying and dangerous, no place for humans. But that fear, in the decades to come, gradually turned to appreciation, awe and joy, for poets and artists, sightseers and backpackers. This episode features Louisa Mackenzie, associate professor of Comparative History of Ideas.

The autobiography of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, was a standard bearer of the abolitionist movement. Having escaped slavery as a young man, Douglass became a famous activist, orator, statesman and businessman. But it is another aspect of his story that is just as intriguing to Habiba Ibrahim, professor of English at the University of Washington: Douglass never knew, nor is there an official record of, his exact age.

“Dover Beach,” a poem by 19th century British writer Matthew Arnold, can be read as both a romantic lament and, as many scholars have concluded, a dark, existential commentary on the loss of religious faith. Through close reading, a way of reading for insight, not information, English Professor Charles LaPorte dissects “Dover Beach.”

What marks the start of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch marked by human impact on the planet? The debate hinges, in part, on how we define “signature events,” the important information left behind as clues. But finding signature events transcends the study of the Anthropocene; it’s how we read to make meaning of a text, a collection of data, even a piece of art. This episode features Jesse Oak Taylor, associate professor of English.