Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The UF Synergies series features informal talks by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere’s Rothman Faculty Summer Fellows, Tedder Doctoral Fellows, and Rothman Doctoral Fellows. Fellows will speak for 20 minutes in length about their funded work, leaving ample time for questions and discussion. Talks are paired across disciplinary boundaries to stimulate discussions about threads and connections across research areas and allow for synergies of ideas to emerge in interdisciplinary conversations.

Dr. Trysh Travis (CGSWSR) “A Gray Account of a Black and White Issue”

Dr. Trysh Travis will present on the research she conducted while she was in residency at the National Humanities Center in the summer of 2019, which resulted in an article with the working title “‘Lee Was a Gentleman’: Understanding White Women’s Polite Racism in the Confederate Monument Controversy.”  She will discuss her decision to write about a statue of Robert E. Lee that was recently removed from a city park in Dallas, a few blocks from the house where her grandmother grew up. She will draw out the connections and contradictions among her political, intellectual, and “artistic” motivations for this project, and the choices she made among possible approaches, archives, and publication outlets. Along the way she will attend to the ways that the environment at the NHC helped her to think about the material.

Luc Houle (History) “Teaching with Archives, Objects, and Maps: Lessons from the National Humanities Center”

All learning begins with curiosity.  In this talk, Luc Houle will introduce lessons learned at the National Humanities Center’s Graduate Student Summer Residency 2019 in order to argue that primary sources should be made more accessible to students and foregrounded more often in the classroom.  Primary sources, such as archives, objects, and maps, spark curiosity among students, leading them to ask questions for themselves.  The instructor can then empower students to help them answer their own inquiries, both individually and in group settings.