September 22, 2014 at 4:08 pm
Faculty, despite cruel rumors to the contrary, are not all corrupted by the Gradgrindian spirit. Indeed, they are warm people, who love nothing more than to see their former students thriving in the world beyond campus. To that end, they love visits. In this photo, from September 2014, Professors Ann Vasaly, Stephen Esposito and Stephanie […]
September 19, 2014 at 11:03 am
Above, a snippet from Prof. Thomas Barfield’s very animated lecture (babba-bing!) on Thomas Hobbes, in September 2014 for the students of CC 203: Foundations of the Social Sciences.
September 12, 2014 at 9:47 am
This past Tuesday, September 9th, Prof. Michael Zank of the Department of Religion lectured to students in the first-year Humanities about the Hebrew Bible. His talk was introduced with some very moving comments by Prof. Stephen Esposito (Classics), the course coordinator. Prof. Esposito has agreed to let us republish his introduction here on the Core […]
September 8, 2014 at 10:54 am
{ A guest post from Prof. James Uden of the Department of Classics; cross-posted from the Classics departmental homepage. } Do Athenians ever sleep? No doubt many of the BU students who spent a month in Athens this summer were already accustomed to staying up late, but the Greeks really showed them how to make […]
September 2, 2014 at 7:38 am
Students just entering the first-year Humanities haven’t yet encountered the Divine Comedy of Dante in the Core classroom… but for sure, they won’t forget it. Many Core alumni report that their exploration of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in seminar with their Core classmates was a formative part of their undergraduate experience. Accordingly, we keep our […]
August 5, 2014 at 5:20 pm
These “Analects of Professor Nelson” were recorded during class discussion by Core student Matthew Spencer, and published in The Journal of the Core Curriculum, Vol. IX, Spring 2000: The Professor said of Rousseau’s Confessions, “Boy, it’s so nitty, and it’s so gritty!” Only then did Matthew understand. When Matthew thought he really understood Rousseau, the Professor said, […]
The Core recently did a survey of syllabi in programs at other schools offering courses that are like Core in method and structure: primary texts, organized chronologically, giving students a working knowledge of the foundational works and ideas of our shared cultural heritage. While many of the books we saw on those other syllabi were […]
March 28, 2014 at 11:42 am
Prompted by Dean Sapiro’s lecture on Mary Wollstonecraft to question why there are so few women authors in the Core Humanities, Prof. David Green had his CC 202 students this week momentarily put aside Pride and Prejudice and the question of whether happiness in marriage is a matter of chance to consider the criteria for […]
March 19, 2014 at 2:28 pm
On Friday of the week before Spring Break, Prof. Green was speaking with his classes about the importance of “human knowledge.” What brought that topic to mind? Well, on his way to work, walking down Beacon Street through Coolidge Corner, he’d seen the book pictured above propped up by some unknown person, against a lamp […]
