By Zhiyu Wang. Lingling Ma’s family was shocked when she told them she wanted to quit Shanghai International Studies University, one of the top universities in China, and apply to colleges in the U.S. She was enrolled in Greek in SISU, a program whose graduate employment rate claims to be 100 percent, but that didn’t stop her from quitting just a few months into her college life.
“I don’t want to be just a translator. I wanted to learn philosophy, literature and everything, but if you major in Greek in SISU, you study Greek for four years. I mean just the language, you wouldn’t even learn Greek culture and history,” said Ma, referring to the lack of quality humanities courses and freedom to select classes in other majors at SISU. Read more...

By Michael P. Ryan. Undergraduate students should join professors in selecting the content of courses taught in the humanities. This is the conclusion I came to after teaching Humanities on Demand: Narratives Gone Viral, a pilot course at Duke University that not only introduced students to some of the critical modes humanists employ to analyze new media artifacts, but also tested the viability of a new, interactive course design. One semester prior to the beginning  of class, we asked 6,500 undergraduates -- in other words, Duke's entire undergraduate student body -- to go online and submit materials they believed warranted examination in the course. Read more...

By William Pannapacker. What teaching colleges and research universities have to gain from collaboration. As academics we can be too snug in our institutional silos. We sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result we duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. Without more coordinated programs, will we go on teaching the way we have since the Industrial Revolution? Will our students, knowing it doesn't have to be that way and worried about their future, lose patience with us?
The digital humanities (or, preferably, the more inclusive digital liberal arts) provides a context for facing those questions head-on. I have written several essays extolling the value of digital approaches as a means of transforming undergraduate education. Read more...

The “Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities” conference will take place at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania from 23 to 24 September 2013.
Organised during the Lithuanian EU Presidency, the conference organisers note that the conference “will elaborate the potential that SSH can bring to European societies”, the “potential that SSH can bring to the goals defined in Horizon 2020”, and how “best to integrate the knowledge, methods and experience the SSH have to offer over a wide range of phenomena and problem spaces”.
Registration is open until 1 September 2013. For more information on the programme, please visit the website.
Mykolas Romeris University is also holding an international academic conference on “Social Innovations 2013: Theoretical and Practical Insights” in Vilnius, Lithuania from 10 to 11 October 2013.
For more information on how to register, please visit the website.