The Humanities Department at SJSU is at the crossroads of academic study and practice. Our faculty and students engage with each other through coursework, scholarship, teacher training, and creative endeavor. Together, we use a full range of humanities, critical, creative, and social scientific tools to unravel the problems and seek answer to our biggest questions.
We work to understand and explain a variety societies, regions, and cultures; religions and philosophies; the full range of human arts and literatures; looking across past and present; seeking strengths and weaknesses, problems and successes. Our graduates go on to be K-8 teachers, public servants, journalists, political actors, arts and museum administrators, and more.
Among the key requirements of being a university professor, faculty research, write, create, and engage with the public in new and productive ways. This research, scholarly, and creative work enables us to continue to bring expert and up-to-date skills and knowledge into the classroom, and translates directly into the quality and value of the courses we teach, the ways we are able to engage with students, and the kinds of educational experiences we can provide them.
As a state teaching university with a research designation, we often find that funding various aspects of our scholarly and artistic work to be scarce. This fundraising campaign would help fund scholar and artist research and creative activities, which can include travel expenses; archives fees and supplies; perform or show expenses; expenses associated with engaging our undergraduate students in the scholarly and artistic process; etc.
Examples of our current work:
- Teacher Education Experiences & Difference: Dr. Eleni Duret is researching the impact on student teachers' understanding of themselves and their goals for their future classrooms after they have completed volunteering, observing, or completing student teaching in a school setting. (elementary or middle school) in which they were a student themselves. She is also working in collaboration with another professor to explore racially responsive practices for Black women educators in the public school system.
- Islam & Politics: Dr. Zárate has recently research the history of Muslim activists in twentieth-century Egypt, how they reimagined God, science, and spirituality at the heart of modern political life. This leads directly into his new research on the relationship between Islam, science, and modernity.
- Environmental Humanities: Dr. Daniel Rivers scholarly and creative work spans numerous modes of exploration into human-environment relationships. Among them are a student research group that is exploring how to use board games to develop students' literacy in climate solutions; and another is researching pop culture representations of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in order to understand how these narratives both represent and misrepresent the ecological impact of oceanic plastic. Dr. Rivers is also a creative writer and their current creative work blends nature writing and cultural criticism to explore queer, trans, and neurodivergent folks' relationships with the environment.
- Teacher Preparation & Service Learning: Dr. Erica Colmenares is studying what happens when student teachers go out into schools and communities to do service-learning — specifically, how those experiences affect them emotionally and physically in ways that shape how they learn to teach, including how the spaces, bodies, and materials around them (like the classroom environment or the community context) are all tangled up in that learning process.
- Digital Humanities & Migration: Among her important projects, Dr. Kim Knight is collaborating in a scholarly-creative project called The Migrant Steps Project. This interactive mobile app and website connects users’ fitness tracking data to curated Humanities narratives about migration from Central America to the United States. As users reach step milestones in their daily lives, they unlock excerpts from novels, films, journalism, poetry, and other media, accompanied by critical analysis and reflection questions that challenge dominant media portrayals of migrants.
- Religious Practice and Schools: Dr. Funie Hsu/Chhî is exploring the debates about religion in American public schools. She is looking at the challenges to mindfulness practices and the increasing integration of Bible-based curriculum to demonstrate how these conversations are not only shaped by long-standing tensions around defining religiosity and secularity, but are also deeply influenced by notions of race.
- Ethical Philosophy, History, and Reading: Dr. J. Todd Ormsbee is engaging with the ethical philosophy of Emanuel Levinas to try to understand the interrelationship between mutual obligations humans have with each other, the ways that we conceive of the past (history), and the way we read and interpret texts.
This is only a small sample of the work our faculty do in order to be active contributors to the artistic and intellectual worlds we live in, in order to bring that experience, knowledge, skill, curiosity, and passion directly into the educational lives of our students. Your donation will help us ensure that our faculty can continue to produce nationally and internationally recognized scholarship and artistic works by supporting the various kinds of expenses that can accompany such work.
