Yen-Hwei Lin has been recommended to serve as Interim Dean of Michigan State University’s College of Arts & Letters, effective June 10. She will assume the role of Interim Dean Designee until the MSU Board of Trustees meeting on Friday, June 28. Pending board approval, Lin will succeed Christopher P. Long, who has served as Dean since July 2015 and has…
The Michigan State University Womxn of Color Initiatives (WOCI) named Paige Hernandez as its 2024 Artist-in-Residence. The sixth artist to participate in this program, Hernandez is a multidisciplinary artist and critically acclaimed performer, director, choreographer, and playwright. She will be in residence on Michigan State University’s campus March 18 to 21.
Alaine Weiss credits her time as an undergraduate at Michigan State University as one of the most impactful experiences in her life and her years in East Lansing among her most treasured memories. But the road to becoming a Spartan was difficult, having lost both her parents due to extended illnesses when she was just 11 years old. Were it…
Michigan State University’s Department of Religious Studies will expand its curriculum to include a focus on Anishinaabe communities, and more broadly, Great Lakes Native American cultures thanks to the creation of two new faculty positions conceived by the Department’s winning proposal for an inaugural 1855 Professorship. Named for the year MSU was founded, the 1855 Professorships, created by the Office…
Michigan State University has launched a new living-learning undergraduate community on campus available to current first-year and incoming students in arts-related majors in the College of Arts & Letters (CAL) or Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH). Participating students will live together in Snyder-Phillips Halls starting in the Fall Semester 2023 and will have unique access to more than 20 art and…
A new open educational resource (OER) created at Michigan State University aims to increase understanding of how a values-based approach to scholarly communication can address the challenges of publishing publicly engaged scholarship, with particular emphasis on humanities and social sciences. This new OER, Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication, is a collaboration between members of the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in Humanities and…
Thirty years ago, Parker Palmer wrote a new preface for the paperback edition of his book, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey. Reporting there on his experience traveling the country to explore the issues raised by the book, he writes: "Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, from their own hearts." Thirty years later, that sense of disconnection has calcified into alienation.
When Stephanie Shonekan, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) at the University of Maryland (UMD), asked about the origins of the HuMetricsHSS initiative at lunch after our workshop this week, I was transported back in time to October 2016 when a group of us met at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, NC, for the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (TriangleSCI). We had gathered to reconsider the question of academic metrics with an eye toward making indicators of quality more humane.
As a member of the Boyer 2030 Commission, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, participated in the development of a national blueprint for undergraduate education at U.S. research universities. This new blueprint, created to address persistent equity gaps in undergraduate educational outcomes, recently was released by the Boyer 2030 Commission in an…
Michigan State University’s College of Arts & Letters held an official opening Nov. 17 for a new space dedicated to the Department of African American and African Studies (AAAS) — the first department of its kind at MSU. “The Ascension of AAAS” event celebrated the 8,400-square-foot renovated space as well as the new bachelor’s degree offered by the department. Located on…