UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Matthew Seybold, associate professor of American literature and Mark Twain studies at Elmira College, will deliver the annual “Celebrate the Humanities” Lecture taking place at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, March 27 in the Hintz Family Alumni Center’s Robb Hall (Room 110) on the Penn State University Park campus.
Seybold’s lecture, titled “Cultural Deliteracy: The Project of Offloading the Humanities,” will examine why humanities education has been continuously defunded and decentered in U.S. higher education while also being propagandistically treated as having sirenic control of student political actions. Seybold uses E.D. Hirsch’s popular education jeremiad “Cultural Literacy” (1987) — which was published in the midst of a financial crisis that was both precipitated by the growth of private equity funds and facilitated their further concentration — and junk bonds — one of the primary culprits behind the crisis—as a starting point for his lecture.
Seybold is also the founding director of the media studies, communications, and design program at Elmira College, executive producer and host of The American Vandal podcast, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and (with Gordon Hutner) of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications.
“Celebrate the Humanities” is an annual event hosted by the Penn State Humanities Institute that highlights and interrogates the work and value of the humanities. Both the lecture and reception that follows are free and open to the public.
Please visit the Humanities Institute’s website or contact its director, John Christman, at jpc11@psu.edu for additional information.