It's one thing to say that the humanities touch every aspect of our lives.  It's quite another to actually be acutely aware of it, especially when taking part in public humanities events and multiple media.

My short time as an Undergraduate Research Fellow for The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP has already taught me so much about research, and specifically about zoot suits in El Paso. I am currently working on a project with Dr. Melissa Esmacher, an Associate Professor of History at El Paso Community College. The project involves researching a riot, or near-riot, that happened in downtown El Paso on June 19, 1943.

Introducing younger people to the humanities can be an especially difficult challenge, especially when the subject may seem too far removed from the present day.  This is the challenge that our group decided to meet head-on in our current project of connecting the poetry and life of poet William Wordsworth to twenty-first century students in West Texas. 

Ein Teil von El Paso—A Part of El Paso

For this month’s round of interviews, I spoke with El Paso Community College's (EPCC) Biology Professor Gertrud Konings-Dudin on her languages and use of them in El Paso, Texas. As a native of France, Professor Konings-Dudin grew up in a multilingual community. Unbeknownst to many Americans, depending on where a person lives in France, citizens are often trilingual, quadrilingual, or more.

On Veterans’ Day, Monday, November 11, 2019, the orbit of the smallest planet of our solar system, Mercury, carried it between observers on Earth and the sun. This transit of Mercury, somewhat similar to an eclipse in that a large sphere passed between human viewers and the sun, slightly reducing the amount of light that reached our planet, is a rare event that was first intentionally observed in response to a scientific prediction in November 1631. Humans will not observe another transit of Mercury until 2032.