What is the Humanities Symposium?
In the simplest formulation, the humanities are academic disciplines that study human culture. The study of languages, literature, history, linguistics, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, comparative religion, ethics, and the arts—use methods that are primarily critical and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the empirical approaches of the natural sciences. The study of humanities “tell us where we have been and help us envision where we are going.” (The Heart of the Matter, Report of the American Academy of Arts & Science’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences to the U. S. Congress in June 2013). As a part of Show Me Research Week, the Humanities Symposium will spotlight the scholarship of undergraduate students working in these important fields, allowing them to help us envision where we are going together.
About the 2025 Humanities Symposium
For 2025, the Humanities Symposium is being co-sponsored by the University of Missouri Center for the Humanities. Dr. Seth Howes will be co-coordinating the Humanities Symposium programming.
Contributors to the Symposium are invited to submit research and creative projects in all areas of humanistic studies.
The keynote speaker for the Symposium will be Dr. Stephanie Hedge from the University of Illinois in Springfield.
Dr. Stephanie Hedge (she/her/hers) is an associate professor of English and the Director of the Writing Program at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches classes on first year writing, digital literacies, and the ways that words do work in the world. She researches digitally mediated pedagogies and game studies, and she is the co-editor of Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom (McFarland 2021) with Jennifer Grouling Snider and the first year composition textbook Digitally Mediated Composing and You: A Beginners Guide to Rhetoric and Writing in an Interconnected World (Kendall Hunt, 2nd ed 2024) with Courtney Cox. She is currently working on a new edited collection for the McFarland Studies in Gaming Series that explores Indie Tabletop Roleplaying Games..
About her presentation on Friday, April 18 at 11 a.m. in Monsanto Auditorium:
Title: TBA
Check this space and the Office of Undergraduate Research for further information about the Humanities Symposium, Student Poster Presentations, and Student Panel Presentations, including online information sessions sessions on how to present humanities research.
The above video is of the “Humanities Symposium; Information Session” held on February 3, 2022 led by Dr. Seth Howes and Dr. Linda Reeder, the organizers of the 2022 Humanities Symposium. It has a lot of great information about what the Humanities Symposium is, definition of the theme “Borders and Boundaries”, how students may participate, and some of the many benefits of participation.