Beppe Cavatorta, Professor of Italian, is the 2024 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the American Association of Teachers of Italian.

The national recognition is given annually in two categories, College/University and K-12. The AATI, founded in 1924, is unique in the field for including teachers at all levels, both high school and university, Cavatorta said.

“The Committee especially recognized Dr. Cavatorta’s invaluable, tireless, exemplary, and distinguished service and commitment to the AATI; dedication and distinguished record as teacher, mentor, scholar, and advocate of Italian Studies; and collaborative spirit and collegiality,” according to the award announcement.

Cavatorta was previously elected president of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, with a three-year term beginning in January 2018, and also served as a regional representative. Additionally, he’s been involved with the Advanced Placement test in Italian since it began in 2006, including serving as Chief Reader for several years.

“This association is what best represents Italian in the United States. Having the possibility to work with high school teachers has been one of the perks of the association. For me, it has been a great opportunity to learn what high school teachers do, support their work, and, at the same time, learn from them,” he said.

The award is one of the few national awards given to scholars of Italian, and the only one given not for scholarly performance, but for service and for teaching, which Cavatorta said he’s most passionate about. And with the University of Arizona having one of the largest Italian programs in the country in terms of majors, it’s a passion shared by all faculty members.

“We have extremely talented people teaching our language courses and that makes students fall in love with Italian,” Cavatorta said. “We try to make everything relevant to the students and their lives and we offer courses based on how Italy is today. The main goal for us is for students to master the language so they can go to Italy and experience it the way it’s meant to be experienced.”

For example, one of the courses Cavatorta is teaching this semester is one he was initially hired to teach, 310 – Italian Encounters: Spoken Italian in Context. The course explores Italy through the decades, from the 1940s to today, through the lens of literature, art, music, cinema and more.

In the spring, he’ll teach a section of the popular general-education course 160D – Food for Thought in Italian Culture. Again using literature, cinema and more, Cavatorta and students will explore Italian food from the Middle Ages until today, learning the myriad ways food impacts culture and history. Food for Thought is a course that was created with input from the entire Italian faculty.

For another ongoing project, Italian in Wonderland, Cavatorta is collaborating with fellow faculty members Maria Letizia Bellocchio and Borbi Gaspar to create a digital platform that transforms Italian classes to deliver language instruction combined with relevant, up-to-date cultural lessons. The project, funded by a three-year, $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, represents a fundamental shift away from expensive textbooks to modules that can be updated regularly as culture changes and will be an open resource for Italian teachers anywhere.

“Having an Italian major or minor is great for students,” Cavatorta said. “When they reach the fifth semester, it’s really like a big family. The classes become closely knit and everyone knows each other.”

The College of Humanities annually recognizes exemplary teaching, research and service with the Helen H. Chatfield Awards. The awards were created in 2021 to honor the memory of alumna Helen H. Chatfield, a successful investor and philanthropist who graduated from the University of Arizona in 1968 with degree in Spanish. Chatfield passed away in 2020 and left a gift to the College of Humanities to create the Helen H. Chatfield Endowment.

The Chatfield Award for Anti-Discrimination Research, Teaching, or Service
Arum Park – Associate Professor, Religious Studies and Classics

The Chatfield Impact Award
Phyllis Taoua – Professor, French and Italian

The Chatfield Outstanding Tenured Researcher of the Year Award
Rae Dachille – Associate Professor, Religious Studies and Classics | East Asian Studies

The Chatfield Outstanding Untenured Researcher of the Year Award
Joshua Schlachet – Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies

The Bachelor of Applied Humanities degree, created through collaborative partnerships across campus, was cited in a new report as one of 12 case studies of programs that successfully deliver a broad education.

“Attracting Students to the Liberal Arts Through Integrative Curricula,” from the National Humanities Alliance, started with a survey to deans at 857 institutions and ultimately produced the dozen in-depth case studies analyzing particular programs at colleges and universities of varying types and sizes.

“At a time when more and more undergraduates are pursuing specialized, technical curricula, initiatives that integrate learning across disparate fields help demonstrate the value of a broad-based education,” the report stated.

At the University of Arizona, the Department of Public and Applied Humanities was founded in 2017 to integrate robust humanities study with pre-professional training. As of September, the program has grown to 381 enrolled majors, the result of steady annual growth.

“The department has succeeded by meeting students halfway—quite literally—with a degree program that is essentially half humanities and half pre-professional training,” the report states. “By providing students with a clear career path based on their interests and demonstrating the value of the humanities for their chosen field, it enables more students to pursue a robust liberal arts education with confidence.”

Alain-Philippe Durand, Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities, said he is grateful for the enthusiasm that collaborators on campus have shown for the program and hopes the mutually beneficial partnerships will continue extending to more areas of the university.

“I was convinced when I first came up with the idea for this degree that it would align very well with today’s global job market needs,” he said. “In the years since, our partners on campus and the students themselves have demonstrated that a forward-thinking, skill-oriented humanities education is excellent preparation for any number of career paths.”

The report attributes the success of the Applied Humanities major to its flexible structure and collaborative partnerships across the university, which continue to be expanded as students flock to the department. The program has partnerships with eight other colleges on campus and offers 11 distinct emphases: Business Administration, Engineering Approaches, Environmental Systems, Fashion Studies, Game Studies, Medicine, Plant Studies, Public Health, Rural Leadership and Renewal, Spatial Organization & Design Thinking, and Consumer, Market, and Retail Studies.

“The Department of Public and Applied Humanities has expanded the reach of the humanities at the University of Arizona. Ultimately, it will increase the humanities’ impact on the industries its graduates enter,” according to the report. 

“The humanities will survive—and thrive—by adapting, and doing so at the University of Arizona has given us numerous opportunities to experiment and fund initiatives that we think signal the future of the humanities,” said Ken McAllister, Associate Dean of Research & Program Innovation. “It’s opened up new opportunities for meaningful collaboration.”

All Applied Humanities students, no matter their area of emphasis, take the same three core courses to start the interdisciplinary program: “Introduction to Applied Humanities,” “Applied Humanities Practice: Techniques and Technologies for Public Enrichment,” and “Intercultural Competence: Culture, Identity, Adaptation, and Intercultural Relations.”

“We get to create transdisciplinary spaces by design, as every core course has students from across the emphases,” said Public and Applied Humanities Department Head Judd Ruggill. “The students are, therefore, always working in diverse teams. Business administration students are often pretty different from fashion studies students, who tend to be different from game studies students, who are different from rural leadership and renewal students. And so they’re learning not just from us, but from one another. They get to bring their specialization to the classroom and share it with interesting groups of people that they likely wouldn’t connect with otherwise.”

The curriculum also emphasizes professional development through a required three-course series: pre-internship, internship and capstone.  

“PAH graduates are debunking misleading myths about humanities majors’ job prospects by securing exciting jobs right out of college,” the report states. “By providing infrastructure for an expanding array of integration of humanities and pre-professional training, PAH has shifted perceptions concerning how the humanities contribute to students’ professional success at U of A.

From the Parthenon to the Olympics to the Oracle at Delphi to the ruins of Delos and Santorini, the wonders of ancient Greece have inspired countless generations.  

In a new collaboration, the College of Humanities and Department of Religious Studies & Classics are partnering with Study Abroad and Fraternity & Sorority Programs to offer a multi-city study abroad trip designed for students in the Greek Life system.

Greek Life in Greece runs from May 19 to June 6, visiting mainland Greece as well as island sites. Students will earn three credits for the course CLAS 315: 7 Wonders of Ancient Greece. Rob Groves, Associate Professor of Practice in Classics, will lead the trip.

“Greece itself will be our classroom and we will learn on the road, as we visit the bronze Age fortress of Mycenae, the healing sanctuary of Epidaurus and walk the path to consult the Oracle at Delphi,” Groves said. “We will run on the racecourse of the Ancient Olympics, and in Athens, climb past the birthplace of Tragedy in the theater of Dionysus, up to the Parthenon on the Acropolis, and down again to the agora of Ancient Athens, where democracy thrived and Socrates argued. When we leave to the islands, we’ll walk the holy island of Delos, see the famous windmills of Mykonos and tour the city on the edge of a volcanic island that gave birth to the myth of Atlantis.”

While learning about Greece's historical trajectory and fundamental cultural institutions, students will reflect on what lessons the Ancient Greeks could share about how to live healthy full lives, how to lead, serve and give to others, how to create and support a culture of innovation, and how to contribute to effective self-governance and a shared sense of humanity.

“The Greek Life in Greece study abroad program is a one-of-a-kind experience that unites members of the fraternity and sorority community, offering immersive academic and cultural engagement with the rich heritage and history of Greece,” said Marcos Guzman, Director of Fraternity & Sorority Programs and Associate Dean of Students.

The program is open to students in any major. Students with a major in the College of Humanities are eligible for the Fearless Inquiries Abroad Scholarship, which awards $2,000 scholarships to 30 students each year.  

Arum Park, Associate Professor of Classics, has been awarded a faculty seed grant from the Office for Research, Innovation & Impact.

The $14,990 grant will support Park’s project, “Exploring the Intersection of Classics and Asia,” which fundamentally challenges the white, Eurocentric view of Classics that has predominated the discipline.

“This is in response to a more traditional way of thinking about classics, that modernity and antiquity are totally separate,” Park said. “This project is part of a movement among classicists to think about how our current realities help illuminate antiquity. This is counter to what people have done in linking antiquity and modernity, thinking of antiquity as a way to understand modernity, but not the other way around.”

By focusing on teaching and research related to the intersection of Classics and Asia, Park seeks to dismantle the disciplinary boundaries that have historically excluded marginalized populations from Classics, in turn increasing the diversity of Classics scholars and promoting a more expansive and inclusive view of scholarly inquiry.

“This project will empower classicists to think about how modern concepts like race and racial justice are integral to the study of antiquity,” said Park, who is also co-chair of the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus.

Park said the project aims to prompt classicists to grapple with and acknowledge that the discipline’s historical focus on ancient Greece and Rome has both caused and been caused by an artificially narrow focus on certain areas of Mediterranean antiquity, resulting in epistemic and social harm to the field and its practitioners.

“To think that there is some impartial view of antiquity that was derived without modern critcal tools is wrongheaded. We've always been applying modern tools to our study of antiquity,” she said.

The project coincides with the launch of “Classics and Asia at the Intersections,” a new book series co-edited by Park and under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

The project will create opportunities for undergraduate research in a new and burgeoning intersectional area of research, support a public speaker series in Fall 2025 focused on diverse and inclusive research, and provide for conference travel and a developmental editor.

“What I’m hopeful for is not just expanding my own knowledge or understanding of this research area, but growing the collective knowledge, of the department, of the field, of anyone who chooses to attend the speaker series,” Park said.

There’s a certain magic that develops in the Humanities Seminars Program, an energy created by the convergence of knowledgeable professors, engaged students and topics of great interest.

For 40 years, that magic has driven the University of Arizona’s premier lifelong learning program and built a community around the exchange of ideas and the enduring lessons of the humanities.

The Humanities Seminars Program began out of a conversation in the third floor hallway of the Modern Languages building, between Richard P. Kinkade, then Dean of the College of Humanities, and David Soren, now Regents Professor of Anthropology and Classics, but at the time only in his first year at the university. 

The conversation centered on an idea from Dorothy Rubel, who had been active in the University of Chicago’s Public Lecture Program and lobbied for years for a similar opportunity in Tucson. Could such a program, Kinkade and Soren discussed, exist at the University of Arizona?

“That was the start of the Humanities Seminars Program, in that very spot in the hallway,” said Soren, who would be at the helm for its first 27 years. “How do you really get the whole thing stood up? There were two criteria. One was you have to be an excellent professor, some kind of a star. But that wasn’t enough because a lot of stars were just boring. And so you had to have a reputation as a great lecturer.”

Since 1984, more than 35,000 community members have enrolled in more than 575 classes in the Humanities Seminars Program. And that initial formula never changed.

“You get the best people and you get the best audience together. You won’t go wrong,” Soren said. “The Humanities Seminars program provides wonderful professors teaching wonderful students all kinds of important information to keep your mind eternally young. The students in this humanities seminars are here because they want to learn and that makes the professors more interested because they realize they can go deeper into the well. You can feel a connection between an audience and yourself when you’re lecturing that you don’t always get. It’s really a beautiful thing to achieve, especially in a classroom, when it rises above the mundane.”

As for Rubel, she became one of the hundreds of active and engaged HSP students, as well as a member of the advisory board and a tireless fundraiser for the program. HSP’s first permanent space, opened in 2007, was named the Dorothy Rubel Room, in her honor. She passed away in 2012 at the age of 108.

Like Rubel, numerous students kept returning semester after semester, accumulating dozens of classes over the years. 

“I stopped counting at 160,” said Phil Korn, regarded as the program’s all-time enrollment leader. “My wife and I had gone to plays and concerts and operas and so on, but I really did not have a good liberal arts background and that’s why I had an interest in so many of the classes. I was like a kid in a candy shop and the professors have been so innovative and the classes just added up.”

In his 25 years as an HSP student, Korn also served 12 years on the board, when volunteers took an increasingly active role in guiding the program as it was forced by university budget cuts to become self-sufficient. HSP successfully raised $500,000 to fund its permanent classroom at the UA Poetry Center and was able to expand the scope of its courses and add summer options. Malcolm Compitello, who followed Soren as director, said the various challenges came with new opportunities.

“We had to rely more on things that the program had not done very much before. We had never done or asked about advertising. We had no marketing strategy. We had never done any fundraising,” said Compitello, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. “That put me in the position, literally, of having to think through ways in which we were going to make the program thrive and grow.”

In 2018, the Friends of HSP Endowment fund surpassed the $1 million milestone, supporting the long-term interests and continuity of what had become UA’s premier adult education series.

“There’s more and more competition and more programs out there, but there’s nothing like this program. This is unique in the quality of the courses, the quality of the instructors and the breadth of what we are able to provide,” Compitello said. “It works for this audience. They want to be engaged and they want to be part of a community. They have that life experience and they have this ongoing curiosity. I can’t tell you how many people says on their evaluations ‘I never had the chance to take that in college, but I’m certainly glad I got the chance to do it now.’ People have put an interest or passion on hold for an entire life and here they get to come back to it.” 

Current HSP student Lizzie Schloss is following in the footsteps of her parents, who took 42 classes from 1985 through 2004. Originally from Germany, Leny Schloss was a nurse and Gerd Schloss was a physician, and they came to see HSP as a second college education that had an enormous influence on their lives.

“They used to talk about it all the time. They just loved HSP,” she said. In fact, HSP earned prominent mention in the family’s annual holiday newsletters.

“Our main intellectual stimulation during the last few years has come from our humanities seminars at the University of Arizona. Since each seminar consists of 30 hours, this means for us 30 hours of pure joy,” Gerd Schloss wrote in 1989. “The greatest enrichment of our lives and the greatest enjoyment during my 23 years of retirement have been the humanities seminars given by outstanding professors at the University of Arizona.”

So when she retired from the university as a career counselor, Lizzie Schloss started her own journey with HSP, up to 16 courses now, exploring history, literature and the arts.

“It’s huge for the university offer this to people in the community, something that is so intellectually stimulating and just a lot of fun to do,” she said. “It’s like being able to indulge every wish that you’ve had to study something, to learn something and not to have to take any tests.”

Karen Junghans, HSP board chair from 2018-2022, took her first HSP class in 2001 and reignited her passion for the humanities. She started gradually, with one class a semester or even year, but found that when she visited museums while traveling, the knowledge from HSP classes had given her new insights. And so her pace increased to three or more a semester, totaling about 80 now.

“It became addictive. There are so many good offerings in one semester. And you go, ‘Oh, well, I can’t ignore that one. I have to take this one.’ You just can’t choose. So you have to take them all,” she said. “In an atmosphere like this, you get so much more out of the class. The knowledge that I have gained is, has made me just so much more enriched as a person. I enjoy literature more. I enjoy traveling more. I enjoy life more.”

Janet Hollander found out about HSP when she moved to Tucson about 15 years ago during a lunch meeting with fellow Smith College alumni and since, she’s taken about 50 courses. A prior board chair, Hollander took a course on James Joyce during the pandemic and appreciated how new technology not only kept students engaged, but broadened HSP’s reach. She was able to invite friends from San Francisco, New York and Chicago to take the same course.

“One of the spectacular things that’s happened is the online effort. Now that it’s possible to do Zoom, it doesn’t matter where people are. It was really quite wonderful,” she said.

Fabian Alfie, Professor in the Department of French and Italian, has taught popular HSP courses on Dante and Boccaccio for more than a dozen years, winning two Ted and Shirley Taubeneck Superior Teaching Awards.

“It’s really exciting teaching the seminarians, because there’s this life experience, they have a deeper knowledge,” he said. “I think of it as a kind of a magic or an energy, because I don’t know where any of this is going. It’s nice to get their questions because they really challenge you.”

The College of Humanities, with experts who cover essentially the entire world, is the perfect place at the university to house such an outreach program, Alfie said. HSP excels most when the courses create opportunities for students to see connections to their own lives.

“The humanities are for everybody. Obviously you can specialize in the humanities, but you can also appreciate the humanities without the specialization. The humanities in general really has lessons for people, for whatever point they are in their life,” he said. “It’s really kind of going back to the well.”

Adele Barker, Professor Emerita in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, has taught seven HSP courses, receiving three teaching awards, and also enrolled in several as a student herself.

“This really sets this institution apart,” she said. “All the while that I was teaching in this program, before I retired, I wanted to take the other courses. This has been my opportunity to actually see what my colleagues are up to, not just in other departments in humanities, but throughout the university. And I have found myself taking courses in everything from music to astrophysics.”

After 35 years teaching Russian literature and film, Barker felt overjoyed to go back to learning for the love of learning.

“In a way, it’s propelling me back, many, many, many, many decades, to that excitement, coming home from school, ‘Hey, look what I learned.’ It’s a gift, both as a student and as a professor,” she said. “It’s been a gift to the community and to me personally. It’s been a gift for 40 years and hopefully for 40 more.”

As an author tasked with writing a book on the history of the University of Arizona, Gregory McNamee thought back to his own undergraduate years half a century ago.

Pursuing a major in classics, McNamee was drawn to the Greeks, to people whose ideas lived on, casting influence over the centuries since. So, when he was researching and writing The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories, he focused on the same essentials: people, ideas and influence.

“I wanted to be sure to make this book a combination of stories about the institution and the institutions within the institution, but thinking about people, and leading off with the idea that these people are the ones who make the university,” McNamee said.

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The book, published in October by the University of Arizona Press, uses the 100 individual stories to paint a full picture of the university’s staggering evolution over almost 140 years, from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. About half of the stories center on the sciences, McNamee said, but the influence of the humanities and arts is clear throughout.

“One of the themes I tried to bring out in the book is how important interdisciplinary work has been, forever. Where that was a new idea at other institutions, at the university, scientists have always collaborated with humanities people,” he said.

McNamee started his undergraduate career as a government major, then changed to anthropology, then traced much of what he was learning back in time to its original sources and ultimately settled on classics. He earned his B.A. in 1978.

“Once I got over to the humanities side of things, that was really the foundation of a literary education that I hadn’t had much of before. I was reading deeply into the ancient authors, surrounded by very, very smart people who were excited to talk about all the ideas humanities represent,” he said. “That propelled me into the thinking that whatever I was going to do in the world, it was going to involve thinking about what it means to be human and how to be a better one. Some of the most memorable teachers I encountered were the ones who were teaching the humanities, and all of them figure in the book.”

As far as his own teachers, McNamee cited the late Richard Jensen, who served as Head of the Department of Classics in the 1970s, and the late Donna Swaim, who is featured in the book with a chapter titled “Donna Swaim and the Power of the Humanities.”

“Donna Swaim helped build the College of Humanities into a powerhouse, ranked 10^th among public universities in the nation in 2021,” McNamee writes, listing numerous faculty members and college leaders responsible for the College of Humanities’ continuing excellence: Robert A. Burns, Richard P. Kinkade, Annette Kolodny, Karen Seat and Alain-Philippe Durand, currently serving as Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities.

“The humanities, in the 50 years I’ve been here, have grown in importance, influence and certainly in number,” McNamee said.

Swaim is mentioned in the book’s dedication section as well, a testament to the broad impact she had on students. Swaim’s reputation at the university boiled down to an endless chain of recommendations, from student to student: “No matter what you do, don’t leave the university without taking a class with Donna Swaim,” McNamee said.

“Many, many professors are admired by their students, many are influential, many are liked and respected, but very few are loved. Donna Swaim was truly loved by her students. She was a living ambassador for the humanities.”

The book also includes a chapter on success and influence of the UA Poetry Center: “If a distinguished poet has drawn breath at any time after 1960, the chances are very good that poet has given a reading at the University of Arizona Poetry Center,” he writes.

The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories is the latest in McNamee’s long career as a writer. He is  the author or editor of more than 45 books and author of more than 10,000 periodical pieces. He has also been a traveling speaker for AZ Humanities for more than 30 years.

Kimchi took center stage at the Bear Down Building on Sept. 26. 

The finale cook-off event for the “Campus Kimchi Masters” scholarship contest brought out students, faculty and staff to observe the culmination of the month-long collaboration between the Department of East Asian Studies, the Center for East Asian Studies and the Korea Agro-Fisheries Food & Trade Corporation (aT Center Los Angeles). Contest winners received scholarships totaling $3,000. 

In the weeks leading up to the main event, U of A students, staff, and faculty entered recipes featuring Korean kimchi—ranging from familiar to reimagined dishes—for a chance to be selected as a finalist to compete in the cook off at the main campus event.

This unique, hands-on cross-cultural exploration of K-Culture was covered by a local journalist in a feature story for the Tucson Sentinel.

The eight finalists were:

Arianne Law – Junior, Operations and Supply Chain Management & East Asian Studies
Ariel Heinrich – Junior, Microbiology, with Minors in East Asian Studies & Molecular and Cellular Biology
Hyunjin Yang – Junior, Exchange Student from Seoul National University, Sociology
Lily Nicole Jones – Junior, East Asian Studies & Religious Studies
Meagan Rausch – Freshman, Political Science & East Asian Studies
Seina Okamoto – Junior, International Student from Japan, Linguistics 
Shu-Chien Yang – Graduate Student, East Asian Studies
Syriana Coronado – Freshman, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science & Molecular and Cellular Biology

The main event featured special talks by Dr. Wooje Lee from the World Institute of Kimchi, James Beard Award semifinalist Chef Ji Hye Kim and Chef Richard Park, as well as performances from U of A’s very own K-Pop dance team, UnderSkore.

During the highlight of the event—the cook off—the eight finalists whipped up their best kimchi recipes for a panel of judges that included Min Ho Kim, President of aT Center Los Angeles, our event speakers, Dr. Lee, Chef Kim, and Chef Park, and East Asian Studies Professors Sojung Chun, Sandra Park, Jieun Ryu, Joshua Schlachet and Sunyoung Yang.

The first-place scholarship of $1,500 went to Lily Jones. The second-place scholarship of $1,000 went to Syriana Coronado. And the third-place scholarship of $500 went to Arianne Law.