Humanities Forum gets off the ground with new classes

Currently based in Bennett Hall until it moves into the former Phi Gamma Delta house at 3619 Locust Walk, the Humanities Forum -- a research center which aims to bring humanities to the local community -- opened an art exhibition last night and is offering both an undergraduate course and a graduate seminar this fall. Barbara Pollack, a 42-year-old contemporary artist, displayed "The Family of Men" in the Meyerson Lower Gallery last night. The exhibition -- co-sponsored by the Humanities Forum and the Graduate School of Fine Arts -- slants Edward Steichen's 1955 "Family of Man" exhibition toward the 1990s, replacing Steichen's photographs with Pollack's own enlarged polaroids of her husband and son. Pollack, the 1998 New York Public Library artist-in-residence, said that Steichen had clear ideas about the universality of human nature in 1955. Moving toward the 1990s, however, the idea that human nature is universal has become less true, Pollack said. "I live with these two guys and I still don't get [humanity]," said Pollack, referring to her own husband and son. "Confusion is OK." Humanities Forum Director and former English Department Chairperson Wendy Steiner said Pollack will be a guest lecturer next week at the new undergraduate "Human Nature" course, which currently enrolls 35 University students enrolled for credit and about 15 members auditing through the College of General Studies. "The class is open to the public when speakers come," said Steiner, who co-teaches the lecture on Mondays and Wednesdays with Linguistics Professor and Linguistic Data Consortium Director Mark Liberman. At yesterday's class, held in Logan Hall, Steiner cited selections from Shakespeare to point out the complex human condition, while Liberman discussed the Latin origins of words related to the humanities. At the end of the lecture, Steiner and Liberman came together -- bridging the liberal arts and natural science -- to map out the development of human curiosity from 1799 to 1899 to 1999. Law Professor Joel Forkosch, who found out about the "Human Nature" course through CGS fliers, said that while he is enjoying the course, he worries that it will not be able to cover all the material in the syllabus. "At this stage of the game, it's very general," Forkosch said, pointing out that the professors ran out of class time while surveying the last three centuries of the millennium. Along with the undergraduate "Human Nature" course, the Humanities Forum has begun a graduate seminar entitled "Human Nature and the Nature of Gardens." Taught by Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning Department Chairperson John Dixon Hunt, the class, offered through GSFA, meets on Wednesdays. Upcoming fall Humanities Forum events include a lecture by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Director Steven Pinker and a public reading and interview with Peruvian artist, playwright and former presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa.