The University of Arizona’s Humanities Seminars Program is taking its premier adult education series off campus for the first time, partnering with Oro Valley to offer a convenient new location for enriching community classes.
Since it began in 1984, the Humanities Seminars Program has offered nearly 350 classes, taught by top UA professors, on a wide range of subjects in the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences. The program surpassed 2,000 annual enrollments for the first time in the last year and strategic planning for an expansion began.
“We’ve been growing incredibly in the last eight years,” said Janet Hollander, chair of the Humanities Seminars board. “It’s the right time to expand and we decided Oro Valley is the place to go.”
Oro Valley offered to host the classes, making the council chambers at 11000 N. La Cañada Drive available as a classroom.
“I am particularly excited that we will be playing host to UA Humanities courses, as I’ve long been an advocate for creating a well-balanced individual,” said Dr. Satish I. Hiremath, mayor of Oro Valley. “While STEM subjects may feed the mind, courses in humanities help define the soul of an individual. Partnering with the U of A is another great opportunity to create a well-balanced community.”
Targeting the northwest side of Tucson is an effort to encourage more people to take advantage of this popular lifelong learning program, said Alain-Philippe Durand, dean of the UA College of Humanities.
“The UA College of Humanities is delighted to start offering programming in Oro Valley this summer. This is part of the college’s expansion on and off campus and of its strategy to offer community and corporate programming in several cities in Arizona and beyond,” Durand said. “I am grateful to Mayor Hiremath for this partnership. The mayor shares our vision and desire to provide his community with quality programming and he also understands the value of the humanities in today’s global economy.”
Malcolm Compitello, head of the UA Department of Spanish and Portuguese and program director of the Humanities Seminars, said the program’s students embrace the opportunity to engage with some of the University’s most accomplished professors.
“This is an ideal venue to expand our offerings of quality adult education,” Compitello said. “The value of learning about literature, language, art, science and culture is something that never diminishes.”
The summer seminar will be held every Friday from Aug. 4 to Sept. 1, from 9 a.m. to noon. For the inaugural class, the HSP Board selected one of the series’ most popular past courses, “Three by Austen: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma,” taught by Peter Medine, professor emeritus of English.
“This is not the Jane Austen we read in high school,” Hollander said. “There’s more to it. Getting to read and study these works with someone with Peter Medine’s background and knowledge is really a treat, whether you’re coming to Austen for the first time or the 10th time.”
The course will examine the fictional world created in Austen’s novels, including the author’s representation of the social conventions and manners of regency England, the emotional and intellectual lives of the principal characters, and also the critique of social, economic and political issues, Medine said.
“What is at stake in Jane Austen is survival: economic survival, social survival, even political survival. But for all the surface polish, for all the art, there is a savagery that exists in Jane Austen’s novels,” he said.
Online registration is open: hsp.arizona.edu. For more information, call (520) 621-2492.
The second offering for the Humanities Seminars Program in Oro Valley will be another high-demand repeat course, “Dante’s Inferno,” by Fabian Alfie, professor of Italian. The course will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. on four Thursdays: Oct. 12, 19, 26 and Nov. 2.
Founded in 1984, the Humanities Seminars Program offers the community a wide range of classes, from astronomy to archeology and from Shakespeare to film noir, taught by top UA professors. During the program’s 33-year history, 20,000 community members have enrolled in 350 classes.