Director
About
The challenges of this new century call for innovative ways of translating research into action, creating citizens who will be more effective in their personal and professional lives. A mid-size regional state university, EIU is a model for democratic, liberal arts education and takes seriously its responsibility to serve as the intellectual and cultural center of the surrounding region.
With the development of a Translational Humanities Center, housed in the College of Arts and Humanities, EIU embraces the opportunity to generate conversations that challenge and define our culture and our conventions. Translating between historical and contemporary worlds, and exploring the benefits of disciplinary cross-fertilization, we also strive to establish communication between the studies of academia and the everyday lives in our community.
Programs and courses sponsored by this center will explore the translation from global investigations by university researchers to local understandings of culture. Our center for the humanities will bring diverse traditions and methods of critical inquiry. We envision a place where faculty and students can access popular notions of the humanities and make our specialized work speak to the public, even as we reach out to our audiences with new information and ideas to foster creativity, engender tolerance, and spark further dialogue.