Humanities
Eccentral Committee: M. Edurne Portela, Ph.D. (North Carolina), MLL – Spanish and Director Humanities Center; Gordon C.F. Bearn, Ph.D. (Yale), Philosophy; Seth Moglen, Ph.D. (California at Berkeley), English; Suzanne M. Edwards, Ph.D. (Chicago), English; Mary Foltz, Ph.D. (University of Buffalo, SUNY), English; Nitzan Lebovic, Ph.D. (UCLA), History; John Pettegrew, Ph.D. (Wisconsin at Madison), History; Michael L. Raposa, Ph.D. (Pennsylvania), Religion; Nicholas Sawicki, Ph.D. (Pennsylvania), Art, Architecture and Design; Vera S. Stegmann, Ph.D. (Indiana), MLL – German
The Humanities Center provides a physical home as well as intellectual, financial, and organizational support for students, faculty, and staff who wish to come together to participate in humanistic inquiry, understood in the broadest possible terms. We seek to enrich the work of existing academic departments and programs in the humanities, by stimulating a wide range of activities that move beyond and across disciplines, urging members of the community to consider in the freest and fullest ways what humans are or have been, what humans have produced and are producing. We seek to break down the division between work and play, between the classroom and the rest of life. We aim to foster vibrant intellectual inquiry, and to diffuse the energies of such inquiry into the broader culture of the Lehigh campus. We choose a theme for each year (The Public Intellectual, Waste, Just Globalization, New Bethlehem, Speaking Bodies, Excess are examples) and bring a series of scholars, intellectuals, artists, writers, activists, and visionaries to address related issues. We host conferences, cosponsor visiting speakers, support reading groups, and organize a works-in-progress series. The Humanities Center also hosts a wide range of informal activities to create lively, unstructured humanistic community.
Course Offerings
The Humanities Center hosts and sponsors the production of the Lehigh Review, an undergraduate research journal founded in 1992 by the Lehigh humanities faculty. Original articles range in topic and subject across the spectrum of undergraduate study, from English to Economics and Physics. Published annually, the entire publication process—from reviewing submissions to editing to design and illustration—is handled almost exclusively by undergraduate students and supervised by a graduate student instructor.
Any scholarly articles, academic essays or book reviews written for a Lehigh course may be submitted. The Review does not ordinarily accept fiction or poetry.
All submissions should reflect sustained intellectual engagement in any of Lehigh’s many fields of study. We are especially interested in essays that draw from the content or methodology of more than one discipline. The Review expects students to submit well-researched and well-written works that exceed a mere synthesis of existing sources. The Review publishes submissions which demonstrate imagination, original insight and a mastery of the subject.
HUM 224. Lehigh Review (1-4)
Students will produce the annual edition of the Lehigh Review, the journal of undergraduate academic (nonfiction) writing. The production tasks are divided into one 4 credit editorial board and three 1 credit pass-fail modules (reviewing, distribution, images). Students may enroll in either the 4 credit editorial board or in one or more of the 1 credit modules. Admission is by application at the Humanities Center. (HU)