The McGillicuddy Humanities Center is sponsoring a Fall Poetry Pop Up on Saturday, October 23, 2021, at 1:30 p.m.

The open-mic poetry reading will be held outdoors at the Orono Village Green amphitheater, located behind the Orono Public Library at 39 Pine Street. The event, which is free and open to the public, welcomes poets of all ages to share their work. Hot apple cider and other fall refreshments will be served.

Poets are asked to keep their readings to five minutes in length maximum to make sure that everyone interested in reading has time to do so. If additional time is available at the end, poets will be allowed to read additional material.

While poets can sign up to read on the spot, advance confirmation is always appreciated at mhc@maine.edu.  We ask that poets consider a public library audience when selecting which poems to read.

The post Fall Poetry Pop Up appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

The open-mic poetry reading will be held outdoors at the Orono Village Green amphitheater, located behind the Orono Public Library at 39 Pine Street. The event, which is free and open to the public, welcomes poets of all ages to share their work. Hot apple cider and other fall refreshments will be served.

Poets are asked to keep their readings to five minutes in length maximum to make sure that everyone interested in reading has time to do so. If additional time is available at the end, poets will be allowed to read additional material.

While poets can sign up to read on the spot, advance confirmation is always appreciated at mhc@maine.edu.  We ask that poets consider a public library audience when selecting which poems to read.

The post Fall Poetry Pop Up appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

The post The Art of Breathing: Original Feminist Poetry by Bria Lamonica appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

On Thursday, November 12, the McGillicuddy Humanities Center will be sponsoring a panel on “The Humanities as Activism in Chicago.” This session of the Socialist and Marxist Studies Series will feature three remarkable panelists whose work at the intersection of the humanities and activism has garnered national attention: Tonika Johnson, Kevin Coval, and Nicole Marroquin. Free and open to the public. Join at 12:30p.m. EST at:

Karen Sieber, humanities specialist at the MHC, proposed the panel to series facilitators Professor Doug Allen and lecturer Michael Swacha, seeing the pivot to a virtual format this semester as the perfect opportunity to bring in voices from beyond Maine. Sieber, who will moderate the panel, is currently doing research on what she calls “tactical humanities,” or using the humanities in strategic outside-of-the-box ways to draw attention to urgent issues. The three humanists she selected for the panel are individuals she knows from her time working as a public historian in Chicago that she feels embody this activist spirit.  “There is an immediacy to their work. I wanted to highlight the way in which these artists use their craft to draw attention to issues that are at once local and universal. The outreach work that Tonika, Kevin and Nicole each do with youth in their community can serve as a model elsewhere about the power of the humanities to engage tomorrow’s leaders. ”

Kevin Coval is an Emmy-nominated, award-winning poet & author of Everything Must Go: The Life & Death of an American Neighborhood, A People’s History of Chicago & over ten other full-length collections, anthologies & chapbooks. He is a founding editor of The BreakBeat Poets imprint on Haymarket Books. Coval is Creative Director of the MacArthur Award-winning cultural organization, ,  and a founder of , the world’s largest youth poetry festival, now in more than 19 cities across North America. He’s shared the stage with The Migos & Nelson Mandela & his work has been feature on The Daily Show, Poetry Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, CNN.com, and four seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Coval was the recipient of the 2018 Studs Terkel Award.

Tonika Johnson is a visual artist, photographer, and community activist from Chicago’s South side Englewood neighborhood. Her  project examines the long history of redlining and segregation in the city. Johnson works to address inaccurate negative perceptions about the South and West sides of Chicago, and open a dialogue about institutional racism and segregation. She is co-founder of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.) and lead co-founder of Englewood Arts Collective. In 2017, Johnson was named a Chicagoan of the Year, and in 2019, she was named one of Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago. She was recently appointed as a member of the Cultural Advisory Council of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events by the Chicago City Council. 

Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist who’s practice includes art making, collaboration, research and cultural production with youth and in communities. She has exhibited locally and internationally, including the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares in Mexico City and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. She is a member of the feminist collective Multiuso, and a former Joan Mitchell Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice Innovation. Marroquin is the creator of Chicago Raza Research Consortium, a grassroots effort to map, gather, and present Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Latinx, and Raza history in Chicago. She is at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more information on the Socialist and Marxist Studies Series click here.

The post “Humanities As Activism” panel to feature noted poet and artists appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

The Fall 2020-Spring 2021 McGillicuddy Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellows are, from left to right, Hailey Cedor, Nola Prevost, Nolan Altvater, and Katherine Reardon. 

Joining the Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center (MHC) as Fall 2020 through Spring 2021 Fellows are Nolan Altvater, Hailey Cedor, Nola Prevost and Katherine Reardon. The new cohort joins returning Fellows Ivy Flessen, Bria Lamonica, and Leela Stockley, who will be completing their research this semester. Fellows receive $4000 each semester for two consecutive semesters, to work on a humanities project of their own devising. They serve as humanities ambassadors to their peers, the campus, and beyond. The MHC currently supports seven undergraduate Fellows, and will be expanding to eight next semester.

Nolan Altvater, of Sipayik and Island Falls, Maine, is a Wabanaki student majoring in Secondary Education with a concentration in English. He will be doing his fellowship research on “Decolonizing Maine Education: Creating an Educational Resource to Improve the Implementation of The Wabanaki Studies Law.”  As a future tribal educator, Altvater hopes to address the poor implementation and lack of resources related to LD-291, also known as the Wabanaki Studies Law. At the culmination of his MHC Fellowship he plans to create a writing camp centered around Maine’s Native history, culture, and epistemologies.

History major Hailey Cedor, of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, was selected as a MHC Fellow to complete research related to local involvement of Lithuanians in the Holocaust and how that currently informs national views and identity in relation to that event. Cedor, a History major minoring in Environmental Horticulture, became interested in the topic after working the past year on Professor Anne Knowles’ Holocaust Ghettos Project, which involves GIS mapping. With Holocaust denial on the rise in Europe and here in the U.S., Cedor believes that bringing stories like this to light are as important now as ever.

Fellow Nola Prevost of Brewer, Maine, is an English Major concentrating in Creative Writing and minoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is interested in the historic use of fairy tales to represent societal issues or moral messages, and is curious how this genre could be used to engage with current socio-political discourse. Her fellowship project, “Feminist Fairy Tales,” will use modern fairy tale conventions and feminist scholarship to create her own collection of fables in hybrid prose poetry form. This collection will address feminist issues, writing especially for marginalized groups within American society.

Katherine Reardon, an English major with a minor in political science, hails from Westwood, Massachusetts. Reardon will be spending her fellowship working on her project, “Family Stories, The Truth, and How It Shape Us.” After a trip to Ireland where her ancestors are from, Reardon became curious about the validity of certain family stories, particularly those told by her late grandfather. Her research will combine oral history, historic documentation and nonfiction creative writing to examine the sometimes-fictional stories families pass down, and how they can shape us.

Students interested in becoming a McGillicuddy Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellowship have two deadlines to apply annually in October and March. The deadline to become a Spring 2021 through Fall 2021 Fellow has been extended until Wednesday, October 28. More information, including application instructions, proposal guidelines, and a rubric, are all available at umaine.edu/mhc/research/for-students/undergraduate-fellowship/ or by contacting the MHC’s Humanities Specialist Karen Sieber at karen.sieber@maine.edu.

The post New McGillicuddy Humanities Center Fellows Begin Research appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

Visiting professor Erin J. Kappeler (Tulane University) will be speaking in Hill Auditorium in Barrows Hall on Wednesday, March 4, at 3PM.

Kappeler will explore key texts by the modernist poet and activist Mary Austin, who helped to invent Native American poetry as a field, to show that the concept of free verse was a tool of settler cultural domination as much as it was a democratization of poetic language or a formal innovation. This history of free verse translations of Native American oral expressions opens pressing questions about the ethics of translation and about legacies of settler colonial appropriations of Native American cultural materials in contemporary English departments.

Part of the McGillicuddy Humanities Center’s symposium on “Society, Colonization, and Decolonization.” The event is free and open to the public.

The post Visiting Professor Erin J. Kappeler’s lecture on “Mary Austin’s Time Machine: Modernist Poetics and Settler Time” appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

The 8th Annual Bangor Humanities Day on Feb. 1 will celebrate music, art, history, literature and other humanities disciplines at venues throughout downtown Bangor. The free public event is sponsored by the Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine.

The day kicks off at Bangor Public Library at 10 a.m. with live music in the atrium by 91����’s premiere all-treble a cappella group Renaissance, currently celebrating their 20th anniversary . From 10:30 a.m.–11:30 a.m., students from Bangor area high schools will share posters on their humanities-based research in the library’s Crofutt Room.

At the Maine Discovery Museum at 10:30 a.m., Penobscot Tribal member Ann Pollard-Ranco will be leading a demonstration on traditional corn husk doll making. Participants will make corn husk dolls that they can take home.

In Bangor Public Library’s Minsky Lecture Hall, 91���� professor of philosophy Doug Allen will present a keynote lecture, “The Decline and Potential for the Renewal of the Humanities: Scientific Reductionism and Gandhi-informed Humanities Research.” Allen’s talk from 1–2 p.m. will address the current state of the humanities and how knowledge produced in these fields helps make better sense of the human experience in a changing world.

Stan Wells, a former director with Los Angeles theatre troupe The Groundlings, will lead a two-hour theater improv workshop for ages 12 and older from 2–4 p.m., also in Minsky Lecture Hall at the library.

Matt Bishop, curator of the Bangor Historical Society, will be offering a hands-on history event in the Crofutt Room of the library, also beginning at 2 p.m, featuring postcard images from Bangor’s past.

At 3 p.m. in the Crofutt Room, Shawn Laatsch from Emera Astronomy Center will be giving a talk on “Cultural Astronomy: Human Uses of the Sky.” His lecture will look at different ways in which all cultures have looked up at the night sky and have used it for navigation, measuring time, and agriculture among other uses. From Stonehenge and the Egyptian Pyramids, Aztecs to First Nations to Polynesians, and many more – find out how these groups used the sky as a tool for exploration and discovery.

From 4:30–6:30 p.m. at the University of Maine Museum of Art, there will be a reception and gallery tour, led by museum director and curator George Kinghorn. The catered reception and cash bar are made possible with the help of Basil Creek Catering.

Norumbega Collective 2.0 will host a poetry reading by local writers from 7-8 p.m. at the Bangor Arts Exchange, followed by a 9 p.m. performance by the local improv group “Unredacted,” led by Stan Wells. For mature audiences.

Bangor Humanities Day follows “2020 Visions: The Humanities at 91����,” a showcase of current research and creative projects in the humanities, Jan. 31 at Buchanan Alumni House. This event, also free and open to the public, celebrates humanities research and creative projects on campus.

For more information on either event or to request a reasonable accommodation, call 207.581.1848.

The post Bangor Humanities Day 2020 appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.

Senior English major and McGillicuddy Humanities Center fellow Connor Ferguson will present his project, “Queering the Fin de Siècle,” on December 6th, 2019, from 2-4pm in the Writing Center.

This project focuses on the importance of recognizing queer identities in the modernist era of literature, the way industrialization and globalization affected queer individuals, and how the metaphorical “closet” is constructed both by society and by personal anxieties, particularly related to Virginia Woolf’s novels and Wilfred Owen’s poetry.

The post Queering the Fin de Siecle: Recognizing Queer Identities in the Modernist Era of Literature appeared first on Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center.