For two weeks in July, the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester led high school students in a quest to understand the philosophical underpinnings and practical expressions of civic life. This was the first year of “Experiencing Civic Life,” an academic preparation and enrichment program designed to help participants become successful college students and active citizens of American democracy.

An internationally renowned art and cultural critic, theorist, curator, and activist, Rochester professor Douglas Crimp created work important to thinkers across the arts and humanities.

In an interview with the Irish Times, University of Rochester philosopher Randall Curren discusses the role of “a proper, virtuous kind of patriotism.”

May 31 is the 200th anniversary of poet Walt Whitman’s birth, and Rochester has a few ties of its own to the poet who contained multitudes.

Fox, a novel by Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić and translated into English by the University’s nonprofit literary translation press, is a finalist for the annual award honoring literature in translation.

Philosopher Zeynep Soysal, who joined Rochester’s faculty this year as an assistant professor of philosophy, works at the place where mathematics and linguistics converge.

As the University’s first artist-in-residence, Ash Arder brings her artist’s sensibility to explorations of conceptual systems, from computer science and the nature of virtual reality to ecology and environmental humanities.

Epistemologist Jens Kipper has joined the University’s Department of Philosophy, bringing with him a focus on the nature of intelligence that spans the fields of philosophy, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

Speakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. But the same words are poets’ medium of creation. In his newest book, How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach asks how poets turn bare utterance into art.

The picture of the Middle Ages as “awful, smelly, stinky, [and] dangerous” is not accurate, says medievalist and University of Pennsylvania professor David Wallace, this year’s Ferrari Humanities Symposia visiting scholar.