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The Charles H. Watts II Humanities Institute

• 2007-08: American Writers/American Places
  Toward a Poetics and a Practice of Sustainability: The primary task of American citizenship and of American writing, Henry David Thoreau suggested, was to continue to discover America — “to discover the discovery” — not as an affair of conquest, colonization and exploitation of nature but as a humanistic exploration of new possibilities of selfhood and community deeply informed by the profound lessons nature has to teach.
• 2006-07: Redefining Nature's Boundaries
  Premodern and Postmodern Confluences: Plato wrote of his teacher Socrates invoking a prayer in a grove of Attica to Pan, god of nature: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.”
• 2005-06: Translations
  The Movement of Meanings: Cultural critic and literary historian George Steiner makes this broad claim in his magisterial work After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. “Translation,” he goes on to say, “is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges.
• 2004-05: Shaking the Foundations of the Western Tradition
  This centenary of the birth of Spanish-Catalán artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) affords us the opportunity to honor their work, learn about the personal and intellectual environments in which they came of age, and reflect on the meaning of their lives and works for us in the early 21st century.
• 2003-04: England c.1500-c.1660
  Early Modernity and Renaissance: 2003 signals the most Elizabethan of years: the United Kingdom celebrates the 50th year of rule by Elizabeth II, while the more historically-minded mark the 400th anniversary of the death of her namesake—Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth I.
• 2002-03: Islam & Philosophy
  A Contemporary Reassessment: Despite an ever-growing interest in non-Western ways of thought, the rich tradition of Islamic philosophy remains unknown to most Americans.