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. 

The College of Humanities is launching a new initiative to explore and build collaborations at the intersections of health and humanities.

Thanks to strong connections with the College of Medicine – Tucson, the Health Humanities Hub is anchored on the third floor of the new Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine building.

“The Health Humanities Hub will unite international humanities scholars, students, medical professionals, community partners and wellness practitioners to explore the zone of discovery where medicine and the humanities overlap,” said Dr. Alain-Philippe Durand, Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities.

Overall, the Health Humanities Hub will promote the principle that “humanities equals health,” Durand said.

“In plain language, this means never forgetting that humans exist at the center of every healthcare visit, every piece of health-related legislation and every one of the countless decisions made daily by individuals and communities about wellness, illness, disability, healing and mortality,” said Christine Hoekenga, founding coordinator of the Health Humanities Hub.

“Language, culture, religion, social context and personal and collective history all inform our approaches to health and wellness,” she said. “The humanities have so much to offer in this realm. The foundational skills of humanistic inquiry – critical thinking, careful observation, empathy, intercultural competence, creative expression, adaptability, collaboration and communication – are the very skills needed to improve the practice of healthcare for both patients and providers.”

Dr. Michael M.I. Abecassis, Humberto and Czarina Lopez Endowed Dean of the College of Medicine – Tucson, said the importance of humanities to health can be described by a quote from Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine: “a good physician treats the disease; a great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

“I think that implied in this quote is the fact that a patient may come from a certain background where culture, language, beliefs, religion, family, community and a number of other elements become essential components of how the disease and what needs to be done about the disease is communicated, and how the patient will accept and respond to the treatment plan,” Abecassis said. “And this is where the humanities can help a physician become a great physician, beginning with their training and continuing along the spectrum of their practice over time.”

Indeed, Hoekenga said, health professionals and caregivers are increasingly returning to these truths with fresh focus on concepts like health disparities and health equity, patient-centered care, social determinants of health and culturally-competent care.

Existing health- and medicine-related activities within the College of Humanities include faculty research on religion and health, multilingual translation and interpretation in a wide variety of public health and medical contexts, disability studies related to health and wellness, and cultural impacts on medicine and health.

At the undergraduate level, the college has majors in Religious Studies for Health Professionals and two emphases in Applied Humanities, Public Health and Medicine. Growing internship programs offer students real-world experience to complement their coursework. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese teaches translation and interpretation courses with a focus on health and has partnerships with Health Sciences to teach first- and second-year medical Spanish to pharmacy students and develop courses for the upcoming Physician Assistant Program.

Dr. Weil and his pioneering namesake center advocate for healthcare that attends to the whole person, including mind, body and spirit. The seven domains of integrative medicine (environment, movement, nutrition, relationships, resilience, sleep and spirituality) reflect the complexity of the human condition. They both represent the future of healthcare in the U.S. and hearken back to healing traditions from around the world.

“As I get to know the College of Humanities, I’m finding new pockets of innovative health-related scholarship, teaching and outreach every day. Likewise, I’m learning about exciting programs in the health sciences and across the university. The possibilities for improving health and the human condition through collaboration are quite literally endless,” Hoekenga said.

Tyler Meier, executive director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, will receive the 2024 Friend of the Humanities Award from Arizona Humanities.

The award recognizes Meier for promoting the humanities throughout his 11 years at the Poetry Center, with Arizona Humanities citing the Art for Justice grants program, which commissions work from writers exploring mass incarceration and supports the work of incarcerated writers, and the Climate Change + Poetry series, which highlighted the role of poetry in the planet's climate future. The award will be presented at the Hands-on-Humanities Awards ceremony on Oct. 5.

“Through this award AZ Humanities is honoring Tyler’s exceptional leadership of the UA Poetry Center. With the Poetry Center’s extremely creative and hard-working staff, Tyler has kept poetry at the forefront in addressing some of the most difficult questions of our time, humanities concerns that affect us all,” said Gail Browne, who was the Poetry Center Executive Director from 2002 to 2013 and submitted the nomination.

Alain-Philippe Durand, Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities, lauded Meier for “actively and tirelessly promoting understanding and appreciation of the humanities in the community.”

“Mr. Meier’s entrepreneurial spirit, passion and kind determination are contagious and he succeeds in motivating his staff and board in following him in proposing new, innovative, events, programs, and development campaigns,” he said. “He is indeed making a lasting contribution to the cultural life of Arizona communities.”

Q: How does the Poetry Center contribute to the cultural life of Southern Arizona communities? 

“The fact that the Poetry Center exists at all is a testament to Southern Arizona, and to the people who make their lives here. It’s a joy to work every day with my colleagues imagining ways we can both honor the magnificence of poetry as an art form and connect poetry to the everyday experiences of our community, in all the nuance and complexity of those experiences. Wallace Stevens said that poetry is a preserve for the imagination—a place where our imaginations can flourish. By that logic, I like to think of the Poetry Center as a kind of national park for the imagination—a place where we can let our imaginations roam wild and free. There are very few places like it in the world.”

Q: In terms of promoting the humanities, what can be accomplished through specific programs, like the Art for Justice grants and the Climate Change + Poetry series? 

"Culturally, we turn to poetry during moments of great significance in our lives. We use the power of the art form to give us the best language we can have at that moment. I think we often recognize in the poet’s voice our own experiences of joy, or of loss, or hope, etc. It’s a communal connection that requires being in relationship, and at its core, I think this is what the humanities are all about. 

“Poetry also can respond quickly to the substance of our lives—it is one of our most flexible art forms. It can be a powerful voice for issues of social concern, and it can remind us of the stakes. One aspect of justice, I think, is seeking to return to a right relationship. Poetry can help us get into right relationship with the grief and trauma that often accompanies the truth, and it can empower us to think in new ways about the agency we have. I believe deeply that art is site where this part of justice—of returning to right relationship—is possible. I think poets are essential to the solutions for our most vexing challenges.”

Q: In what ways can poetry create a sense of belonging in our communities?

"We have been thinking a lot about belonging at the Poetry Center, and are launching the Belonging Initiative as one of our next flagship efforts. Our interest is manifold, but it stems from the underlying understanding that a major cultural deficit in contemporary American life is belonging. That understanding is further supported by social science research and even an advisory from the Surgeon General on the public health impacts of loneliness. The building blocks of belonging are embedded in what poetry does best—allowing us to look deeply into ourselves while showing us simultaneously how we are connected to others, often through the spectrum of a human register of emotions: grief, hope, joy, pain and more. What connects us to the things that matter in our lives? We think poetry has a lot to say in helping us build the capacity for belonging and we’re excited to explore answers in innovative new ways." 

Majoring in German Studies not only brought Thomas Noth closer connections to his family, but like so many other humanities graduates, he found that exploring personal passions has yielded unexpected benefits throughout his professional life as well.

Noth, who graduated with a double major in German Studies and Psychology in 2018, and continued to earn a master’s degree in Counseling in 2020, is the College of Humanities 2024 Young Professional Achievement Award recipient.

Now a clinical supervisor for substance use services at MHC Healthcare in Marana, and founder and founder and primary therapist for BrighterView Counseling, LLC, Noth said that choosing the humanities made him a more well-rounded therapist and helped him connect with his patients better.

“When I look back at my experience with psychology, it was the degree that helped me get into my profession. German Studies was something on top of that and was a lot more fulfilling and meaningful, but it also added a lens to the world that maybe psychology by itself doesn't,” he said. “German Studies created an opportunity for me to really focus on that compassionate and empathetic side of health care.”

When he first started at the University of Arizona, Noth first took Spanish for his language requirement, before deciding to switch to German. Developing a more adult relationship with his grandparents made him more curious about their journeys as two immigrants from Germany who met at church in Buffalo.

“I was wanting to look through photo albums. I was wanting to look at old slideshows, learning about and getting connected with my family that currently lived in Germany,” he said. “I got to a tipping point where I wanted to be closer with that part of my family and honor and respect my grandparents and make sure that I understood what they had to go through to get here. It was special for me to learn their language and it opened my eyes to so much.”

Loving his German classes, Noth went beyond his initial plan for a minor and declared a double major. Learning as much as he could about German language and culture added another layer to his college experience, giving balance to his busy schedule of marching band, internships and psychology courses.

He remained focused on his career goals, but found he got there in a better way through German Studies, through the program’s personal touch, but also through honing his critical thinking skills and developing a more big-picture view about people’s experiences.

“I think humanities and health go together because without that human aspect, we're not able to really focus on treating the full person,” he said. “We want to be able to focus on an integrated care approach. If you're not really focused on the person and their background, their culture, their identity, the language that they speak, and how they interpret the care that you're trying to provide, it doesn't resonate as much.”

Now, as a therapist as well as a supervisor, he understands the significance that language, nationality and culture have on health disparities and how those elements must be considered in developing relationships with his patients.

“When I’m meeting with somebody one on one or in a group setting, I can do an assessment, I can diagnose, I can put all these labels and tags on people that are very big picture. But when you add that additional lens of more of that compassionate, empathetic side of health care, which I was able to gain an appreciation and understanding for through my humanities lens, it just allows me to be a much more well-rounded practitioner,” he said.

A career specializing in multilingual education unsurprisingly went multinational for Larry Berlin, but his new role brings him back to where he started.

Berlin earned his doctorate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona in 2000, and while in the Ph.D. program, he also taught at the Center for English as a Second Language. And 24 years later, he’s now the director of CESL, taking over after Robert Côté retired.

Berlin returns to the U of A from Colombia, most recently, where he’s been Academic Director of Languages at EAFIT University. He’s also worked as an English Language Specialist for the U.S. Department of State in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and spent 17 years at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, where he was Professor of TESOL, English Language Program Coordinator, Director of International Programs, and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Linguistics, Philosophy, and TESOL.

A language student as well as instructor, Berlin has studies Spanish, Danish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, Mandarin, Vietnamese and Russian. 

“The reality is when you’re learning a second language, you’re not going to get it perfect. It takes a long time. For me, I tend to approach the languages I’ve learned best just by talking, even if the grammar isn’t right. People will correct you. It’s part of the communication process and the nature of how we engage with one another. We have to be willing to make mistakes,” he said. 

Q: What sets CESL apart as a leading center in language education for more than 50 years?

"The comment I hear most is about the amazing teachers we have and the supportive structure they’re creating for their students. Everyone can succeed here. Our teachers have years of experience and expertise in the classroom and presenting through multiple modalities and they’ve honed their skills to perfection. Students can see our teachers’ commitment to their learning and that’s what makes them so effective. That’s why we’ve existed for 50 plus years and why we’ll continue for the next 50."

Q: How does language learning open more opportunities for students and graduates?

"In a very practical sense, we’ve seen an increase over the years of bilingualism being something that’s a minimum requirement for many jobs. The reality is, if you’re not studying a second language, lots of doors are going to be closed off to you. The type of access to information that comes through learning a second language, and processing it through culture, is not matched in any way, certainly not through an app, without going through that process yourself." 

Q: What’s the importance of multilingualism and multilingual education in the 21^st century?

"Having access to at least one other language, if not more, can only open up more possibilities for you. It’s essential for being engaged in this world and being open to new possibilities. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, different studies suggested an increased elasticity and the potential for greater mind capacity in bilinguals and multilinguals. The ability to speak different languages and develop different perspectives beyond your own culture’s regarding the human condition enhances empathy and flexibility in 21st century skills, such as critical thinking and intercultural communication. Additionally, studies in reversing language shift profess that preserving endangered languages and access to those languages can prevent a loss of human knowledge." 

Q: What role has the humanities played in your career?

"It’s difficult to say what the role of the humanities has been in my career, not just because of the breadth of the question, but because I don’t think we realize it on a daily basis. I have always considered myself an educator first and focused most of my work on social sciences and education. But it was through the people in the humanities that I got my core foundation, not just as an educator, but in life, because I really see the two tied together. Studying for my SLAT Ph.D. helped me to develop and solidify my philosophy about teaching and learning. I want to share and listen to ideas, instead of imposing them on people. I have taken this same humanistic approach to leadership and administration in education. Everybody has a voice and everybody has a perspective."