Our largest offering, the John W. Altman Program, is a yearlong, themed inquiry program that includes a bi-weekly faculty seminar, a series of ten distinguished lectures, an undergraduate fellows program, team-taught seminars, and links to dozens of other courses. Each year, the program brings together ten faculty members, eight student fellows, and ten visiting speakers. Its public events draw 2,000-3,000 people. Recent topics have included: The Midwest, Race & Racism, Migrations, Time & Temporality, Truth & Lies, Urban Futures, Medicine & the Humanities, and the Anthropocene. Popular with faculty, students, and administrators, the Altman Program offers intellectual community and showcases the relevance of humanities scholarship to matters of social consequence. A 2015 external review of the Center said “the Altman Program is one of the best imagined, designed and run such initiatives at any university in the world.”
The Humanities Center cuts across disciplinary boundaries to support innovative inquiry as soon as it begins. The center coordinates numerous research clusters in which faculty share new work, get valuable feedback, and meet with leading scholars. Over the years these groups have included the Early Modern Collective, the American Cultures Seminar, the Visual Literacy Working Group, Political Economy, Environmental Humanities, Possible Futures for Minority Studies, 21st Century Poetics, Gender, Science and Technology, Medical Humanities, and more.
The Humanities Center also launches initiatives designed to enhance its own services and the liberal arts at Miami. Major initiatives have including a six-member Digital Humanities Working Group, a two-year, twenty-member Valuing the Humanities Project, Laptop Lectures, Humanities Futures, and HumanitiesWorks, an award-winning four-year career services project.
Long viewed as a “public ivy,” Miami University places exceptional emphasis on engaged undergraduate learning, liberal arts training, and the integration of teaching and research among faculty and students. In concert with this mission, the Humanities Center seeks to be a leader in rethinking the place of the humanities in the twenty-first century university. Our emphasis on public humanities and cross-disciplinary research is inseparable from our aspiration to be an engine of curricular innovation and humanities programming at the undergraduate level.
The Center has launched a new minor in medical humanities, a humanities career initiative, and numerous programs to improve the quality, quantity, and public impact of undergraduate research and creative projects.
The director and associate director of the Center are appointed by the dean and share responsibility for planning, academic programming, financial oversight, fundraising, and public outreach.
The steering committee advises the director on matters of funding, selection of the Altman program and its participants, annual financial planning, fundraising, and other aspects of governance. The Steering Committee consists of all current-year Altman Faculty Fellows; three at-large elected members, all from different departments or programs, who serve staggered, three-year terms; the director; the associate director; the past director for one year after the completion of service; and an ex-officio representative from the Dean’s office.
Faculty associates are the faculty community that constitutes the Humanities Center. All Miami University faculty members (including temporary, visiting, and part-time faculty) with interests in humanities scholarship are members by default.
The Center associates form the wider scholarly community of the Humanities Center. They may include students, other members of the university community, and local or regional scholars interested in an association with the Center.
All events sponsored by the Humanities Center are free and open to the public.
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Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Geoffrion Family Director of the Miami University Humanities Center. He is the author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell 2000), The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Cornell 2012), as well as numerous essays His short stories have appeared in Story Quarterly, Threepenny Review, The Sun, Columbia, Mississippi Review, and Epoch. They have also aired on Public Radio International’s “This American Life” and received mention in The Best American Stories. He is the recipient of the Benjamin Harrison medallion and four teaching awards, including Miami's university-wide teaching prize, the E. Philip Knox Award. He is currently writing about the cultural politics of security.
Carolyn Hardin is associate professor of Media & Communication at Miami University in Ohio. She holds a Ph.D. in communication and cultural studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research centers on intersections of culture, economy, and technology in such contexts as the financial crisis, retirement investing, consumer debt, mobile payment technologies, political rhetoric, and television fandom. Carolyn teaches courses on media and technology, consumer culture, and American culture. Her work has been published in American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, and Convergence. Her book on the financial crisis, entitled Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination, was published by Duke University Press in 2021.
Stephanie Marlow holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Miami University (2016). She rejoined the Miami community in October 2022 as a member of the Humanities Center team and is thrilled to be back at her alma mater. Outside of work, Stephanie enjoys a vibrant life surrounded by her many animals. She spends her free time immersed in reading, writing, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Her favorite topics of conversation include tabletop RPGs, the works of Cassandra Clare, and stories about her beloved pets. Stephanie will be starting her Masters degree in Student Affairs in Higher Education in Fall 2025.
Cody Norris is a doctoral candidate in English specializing in dramatic literature, performance studies, and literature of the American South. His research focuses on tourism in the South—specifically in Charleston, South Carolina—as an epistemological site, analyzing how the landscape, local people and customs, culinary experiences, and theatres are rich with performative possibilities when considering the position of the tourist.
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Nicholas Rentschler is a first-year student at Miami University, pursuing a degree in Political Science with a possible co-major in business. He also works a secondary job as an Event Service Specialist at Armstrong Student Center. He loves spending his time among his acappella group, 'The Cheezies', and further honing his skills as a photographer and editor in his day-to-day life.
Ron Becker, Professor of Media and Communication in the Department of Media, Journalism & Film. He studies the relationships among media (especially television), culture, and the politics of sexual identity. He is the author of Gay TV and Straight America (Rutgers 2006) and co-author of Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age (Bedford 2025). His essays have appeared in TheTelevision Studies Reader, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and The Craft of Media Criticism. His current project examines the growing influence of multicultural empowerment narratives in U.S. media culture.
Matthew Crain is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication. His research, writing, and teaching focus on the political economy of media, advertising, and consumer surveillance. He is the author of Profit Over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (Minnesota, 2021) and a number of journal articles about the commodification of attention, data brokers, ad tech, political manipulation, and media ownership.
Andrew Hebard is an Associate Professor of English with a focus on late-nineteenth-century American literature. He has published articles in American Quarterly; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; African American Review; Arizona Quarterly; Studies in American Naturalism; and the Mark Twain Annual among other journals. His book, The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885-1910 (Cambridge, 2013), examines how American literature conventionalized legal forms of sovereignty and administration. His recent work examines the relationship between literary aesthetics and corruption in the Progressive Era state, and he has also recently published a series of articles and book chapters on aesthetic apprehension and statistical thought.
Erik Jensen, Associate Professor of History, studies modern German and European history, with a particular focus on the society, culture, and politics of the interwar period. His first book traced the emergence of a physical self that subjects came to feel should be constructed in a certain fashion. His current research project explores the complicated choices made by a half-Jewish German woman who survived the Nazi regime in part by participating in morale-building missions on the German frontlines, with the attendant concealment, subterfuge, and invented pasts that such a survival strategy necessitated.
Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Ph.D., is a Professor of Theatre in the College of Creative Arts. Mullenix also served for 19 years as an administrator at Miami: Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the College of Creative Arts, and Department Chair of Theatre. As a cultural historian, Mullenix writes about antebellum performance and the American Civil War, with an emphasis on race and gender. Her current book Staging Stowe: Performing the Politics of Slavery will be published in 2028 by the University of Iowa Press.