Shownotes: As a Literature PhD candidate, I KNOW the humanities matter. Part of what makes them matter, what makes fiction matter, is that it provides a way for us to see the patterns (or archetypes) we follow as humans and also to fight against those patterns, to see the world anew. It helps us understand, empathize, even sympathize with others who we’d otherwise have little or no contact with. But that requires us to reach back out to the world with our newfound understanding. That act of learning and reaching out, for me, is the essence of Public Humanities. And that’s something we don’t do enough in literature classes in academia. So I wanted a way to build a public humanities approach in from the get go.

This term, my students will be researching and creating two main types of episodes:

ARCHETYPES

ANARCHY 

We’ll cap off the term by reading Seanan McGuire’s Indexing and students will write themselves into modern fairy tales in their final, creative, episodes.