November 18, 2015

New Humanities Forum gives students, faculty opportunities to interact outside the classroom

Music professor Dr. Sang Woo Kang will present a lecture and recital on Friday, Nov. 20, as the inaugural event in PC's Humanities Forum.
Music professor Dr. Sang Woo Kang will present a lecture and recital on Friday, Nov. 20, as the inaugural event in PC’s Humanities Forum.

Providence College already had a signature academic program exploring the greatest thinkers in western civilization. In 2013, it opened a new building dedicated to the study of the humanities. All it needed, Dr. Raymond F. Hain believed, was a way to allow students and faculty to engage regularly in intellectual life outside class.

So Hain, an assistant professor of philosophy since 2011, created The Humanities Forum, which will host its first event on Friday, Nov. 20, at 3 p.m. in the Ryan Concert Hall of the Smith Center for the Arts. Dr. Sang Woo Kang, associate professor of music and department chair, will lecture about music from the 18th to the 20th centuries. He also will perform a recital with selections from Mozart, Beethoven, and John Corigliano.

The event is open to the College community, but the topic was selected especially for the approximately 1,800 freshmen and sophomores studying in PC’s signature Development of Western Civilization Program (DWC). Kang’s presentation will help to satisfy the fine arts objective in the DWC core curriculum, Hain said, and will assist first-semester sophomores in learning about the music of the historical period they are studying in class.

Hain said the forum, which will be ongoing, is intended to be “a regular time and place where faculty and students can share in the intellectual life outside of class, deepen our appreciation of the humanities, and host guests from inside and outside the campus.”

Raymond-Hain_164709Hain is chair of the forum committee. The members include representatives from each department teaching DWC: Dr. William P. Hogan, associate professor of English and chair of the Center for Engaged Learning; Dr. Patrick H. Breen, associate professor of history; Dr. Colin G. King, assistant professor of philosophy; and Dr. Holly Taylor Coolman, assistant professor of theology.

Dr. Sandra T. Keating, associate professor of theology and chair of the DWC Program, and Dr. Stephen J. Lynch, professor of English and director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program, are ex-officio members.

Lectures and presentations linked to the first and third semesters of DWC will be offered in the fall semester, Hain said, and those linked to the second and fourth semesters will take place in the spring. The spring semester also will focus on contemporary topics.

Next month, The Humanities Forum will host a lecture by Dr. Brad S. Gregory, the author of The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press, 2012). Gregory, the Dorothy G. Griffin Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame, will speak on Friday, Dec. 4, at 3 p.m. in Aquinas Hall Lounge.

In April 2016, Hain said, two scholars will speak about the founding of the United States, a topic second-semester freshmen will be studying at the time. During 2016-17, Dr. Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University professor and editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers, will lecture.

“Lots of students have expressed interest in the forum because of the content and the opportunity to sit down with professors on a more frequent basis,” Hain said.

While some lectures will be held in the Smith Center and Aquinas Hall, and films will be shown in Guzman Hall, Hain hopes the Great Room of the Ruane Center for the Humanities will become the “signature location” for Humanities Forum receptions.

Hain, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, said he was inspired to begin The Humanities Forum because of his undergraduate days at Christendom College in Virginia, where “it was common to eat your meals with your professors.”

“I realized that there were few opportunities to see my students in an intellectual context outside of class,” said Hain. “I became convinced PC would benefit from something that would encourage that kind of interaction.”

The Humanities Forum is not Hain’s first outreach to the College community. Since the summer of 2012, he has hosted Faculty Reading Seminars in World Civilization. Three times a year — during the fall semester, spring semester, and the summer — faculty meet to discuss a book. This semester, it’s The Five Books of Moses, a commentary on the first five books of the Bible.

The Center for Teaching Excellence purchases the books and study materials and pays for an opening and closing luncheon. The group meets Fridays at 12:30 p.m. in the Liberal Arts Honors Program seminar room in the Ruane Center.