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: Migrations, Time & Temporality, Truth & Lies, Urban Futures, Medicine & the Humanities, The Anthropocene, and Globalization & Belonging. 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 from multiple programs come together to share new work, get valuable feedback, and meet with leading scholars. Current research clusters include the Early Modern Collective, the American Cultures Seminar, the Visual Literacy Working Group, Possible Futures for Minority Studies, 21st Century Poetics, Gender, Science and Technology, Medical Humanities, and the yearly Altman Faculty Seminar.
The Humanities Center also launches cross-disciplinary working groups designed to advance its own mission. Currently, a six-member Digital Humanities Working Group is using seed money to develop new digital capabilities on campus, and a ten-member Valuing the Humanities Task Force is developing evidence-based arguments for the undergraduate study of humanities subjects.
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 two Altman Faculty Fellows, who serve during the year of their fellowship; three at-large 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 his or her 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 earned her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing (2016) at Miami University. Since graduating, she has worked as an Administrative Assistant at an in-home care company and as an Eligibility Referral Specialist with Butler County Job and Family Services interviewing people for SNAP and Medicaid. She has two dogs and three cats. She joined the Humanities Center team in October 2022 and couldn’t be happier to be back at Miami again.
Lauren van Atta is a second-year doctoral student in English specializing in early modern drama and queer theory. She earned her B.A. from the University of Dayton and her M.A. from Lehigh University. She is currently writing about bodies, reproduction, and queer identity in the writing of early modern authors.
Cody Norris is a first-year doctoral student in English. His research interests include early modern drama, queer theory and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. He earned his B.A. in English and M.A. in writing at Coastal Carolina University.
Ron Becker, Professor of Media and Communication and Strategic Communication in the Department of Media, Journalism & Film, 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 2015). 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.
Andrew R. Casper is a specialist in the renaissance and baroque art of southern Europe with a particular emphasis on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century religious imagery in Italy. He is the author of Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (Penn State, 2014). His current research examines theologies of artifice in conceptualizations of the Shroud of Turin from 1578 to 1694. His research has been supported by a Fulbright Grant and by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nathan French is an associate professor of comparative religion. He specializes in Islamic law (sharīʿa), Islamic legal theory, Islamic theology, and contemporary Middle East history. His research explores how contemporary Jihadi-Salafi movements, such as al-Qa'ida and ISIS, appropriate and re-interpret Islamic law and theology for their sociopolitical projects. He is presently completing a monograph, "And God Knows the Martyrs: Theodicy, Violence, and Asceticism in Jihadi-Salafism."
Andrew Hebard, Associate Professor of English, studies late-nineteenth-century American literature. He has published articles in American Quarterly; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; African American Review; and Arizona Quarterly. He has a chapter on science and aesthetics in the Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism (2019). 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 current book project examines the relationship between literary aesthetics and corruption in the Progressive Era state.
Elisabeth Hodges is Associate Professor of French and Chair of French, Italian, and Classics. She is the author of Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Ashgate, 2008). Her essays have appeared in publications in France and in numerous journals. Her current scholarship focuses on French and contemporary art film with publications on Godard and the television series The Wire, and work in progress on sound in Isaac Julien’s 10,000 waves. She serves as a docent for the Contemporary Art Center and guest curates film presentations for the CAC and the Mini Microcinema. She is currently writing a book on sensory aesthetics in contemporary art films.
Kaara L. Peterson, Associate Professor of English, studies Renaissance medical history, art history, and literature. Her most current publications are Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, with Amy Kenny (Palgrave Macmillan), and The Afterlife of Ophelia, with Deanne Williams (Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, and Studies in Philology, among others, and in collected volumes. She recently held a Plumer visiting fellowship at St. Anne's College, Oxford, and is the recipient of an upcoming Burleigh Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge.
Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. focuses on questions concerning knowledge in light of differences in social power among knowers. She has published extensively on the ethics and politics of knowledge and examines the
manner in which knowing the world depends on relations of interdependence and the implications (both ethical and political) of knowers’ need to rely upon one another.