Woody Allen’s new film Midnight in Paris is being screened at the Festival de Cannes in southern France.
Midnight in Paris apparently offers a nostalgic appreciation of Paris with historic vignettes of famous Americans who were active in Parisian culture during the twentieth century.
The Washington Post reports on Woody Allen’s presentation of the film at Cannes.
Historians are increasingly engaging with historical films, serving as historical consultants for film productions and as film reviewers for diverse publications.
The American Historical Review experimented with film reviews for several years before shifting the reviews to the American Historical Association’s newsletter publication, Perspectives on History.
The American Historical Association has now compiled a list of 100 Films Reviewed by Historians for its blog.
Students in HIST 390 Film and History: War in Film can search through this list for academic film reviews for their historical film projects.
Digital humanities projects are increasingly integral aspects of research in the humanities. Many humanities scholars have tried to assess the meaning of digital humanities developments for historians, literary scholars, and other humanities specialists.
An article by Kathleen Fitzpatrick in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers a useful perspective on digital humanities.
I am fascinated by the potential of digital humanities projects, having worked for three years with the Medici Archive Project on a major interdisciplinary digital humanities database that offers a “search engine” to the archival holdings of the Medici family and its princely state in Tuscany.
Some digital humanities projects merely engage in digitization of images and texts, essentially delivering humanities sources more rapidly to scholars. Other projects offer new information and analysis through relational databases, research tools, and communication techniques.
Much more work is needed to theorize the potential of digital humanities projects to contribute to humanities scholarship.
History graduate students and assistant professors need to meet acquisitions editors of academic presses in order to “shop” their book projects. They also have to learn how academic presses operate if they hope to publish their manuscripts.
Major academic conferences present great opportunities for learning about academic presses and for making initial contacts with acquisitions editors.
A history graduate student’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers suggestions on how to meet editors at an academic conference.
More reports about outright fraud in for-profit educational companies, such as Kaplan and Phoenix, have surfaced.
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education focuses on instructors’ testimony about fraudulent practices by for-profit educational institutions. “We were supposed to keep students in the classroom by any means necessary,” says a former teacher at a for-profit institution quoted in this article. “It was all about keeping people in the seats to keep the federal money coming in.”
Many taxpayers are unaware that their tax dollars are being diverted to for-profit educational institutions through federal scholarships and financial aid. Such financial support should be reserved to assist students attending non-profit universities and colleges.
A number of history plays have received Tony Award nominations recently. Notable plays such as The Book of Mormon, The Scottsboro Boys, and War Horse are all based on historical events and issues.
Bruce Chadwick, who teaches at Rutgers University, assesses the historical plays receiving Tony nominations in an article on HNN.
Professors in universities across the country hear lots of talk these days about “engaged learning.” The concept can be useful in promoting alternative educational experiences and formats both inside and outside classrooms. But, “engaged learning” is often been misused and even abused.
Here is an article from the Chicago Tribune about an incident of improper “engaged learning” at my own university, Northern Illinois University.
In my opinion, humanities and sciences professors need to take charge of more “engaged learning” initiatives to ensure that that have academic integrity and educational purpose. Otherwise, student activities outside the classroom risk turning into community service or even exploited labor.
Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, spoke on “Defending the Liberal Arts” at the American Council of Learned Societies annual meeting in Washington recently.
Leach argued that “we need an infrastructure of ideas,” comparing humanities research networks to the interstate highway system. “The humanities are America’s stock in trade. They’re an aspect that we shortchange at our peril,” he said.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Leach’s remarks and on the issue of threats to the liberal arts.
A new group of Christian millennarians led by fundamentalist Harold Camping is proclaiming that the world will end on 21 May 2011, when true believers will be “raptured.” The Washington Post reports on Camping and his millennialist movement in an online story.
This movement taps into a powerful current of millennial belief in American popular culture. The Pew Research Center recently polled Americans on their religious beliefs, finding that an astounding 41% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ’s Second Coming will occur before 2050.
For early modern historians, such millennial expectations seem unremarkable and even routine aspects of Christian practice. Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and many other Reformation leaders believed that the Last Judgment would occur during their own lifetimes. Jan Matthijs famously led millennialist Anabaptist followers to their deaths at the siege of Münster in 1534.
There is a long history of millennial thought and prognostication in Christianity. A good starting point for considering apocalyptic belief and millennarianism is Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
The faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago voted recently to form a faculty union, which will be affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which supported the UIC faculty unionization efforts, reports on faculty organization and union authorization vote in a 29 April 2011 story on the AAUP website.
Graduate students and faculty at Northern Illinois University will want to track how the unionization movement at the neighboring UIC campus proceeds.
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