Prof Golden Owens, the newest faculty member in the Cinema & Media Studies department, joins HAS for an interview about their undergrad and graduate student experiences.

I studied Spanish and Environmental Studies. Both of these areas have always been important to me and they are both closely linked to my identity.

Find your community and work that you're interested in outside of academia! I've found that, for me, the academy can feel very isolating -- like you're stuck in an ivory tower. Investing time in your community and making connections can help you get out of that mindset and makes your work as a humanities student all the more meaningful.

Talk with the advisors and try and find a routine and organization that works for you. In both your college schedule and daily life.

The work you are doing matters! UW is a school with a strong emphasis on some of our STEM fields, and it can be easy to feel a bit lost in that environment. No matter your discipline, be it linguistics, theatre, fine arts, cultural studies, or literature, you are doing indispensable work and learning vital skills to connect us to one another as people and root our world in that social experience. This connection is the basis of all industries and fields, no matter what you choose to pursue. The education you obtain through studying the humanities is crucial to continue to understand one another and create the world in which we want to live. Thank you for the work you are doing, it is so, so important.

Professor Geoffrey Turnovsky (French and Italian Studies) discusses the value of the Digital Humanities with English professor Anna Preus.

I love my double major because it combines two passions: languages and language learning. Linguistics fascinated me and furthered my understanding of this field. Spanish, and the Spanish Heritage Language program was a phenomenal experience connecting me with other heritage speakers who love the language as much as I do.

A Classical Studies major is akin to taking your own hero’s journey through ancient Greece and Rome. Along the way you are guided by a contingent of sophic sages, the dedicated professors supporting your quest for knowledge, as you explore the language, culture, literature, and history of the ancient world. 

Professor Diana Flores Ruíz comes to us from the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in film and media studies.  Her current book project explores the visual technologies (from cartography to biometrics) that have been used to draw and redraw the US-Mexican border, how they work to maintain settler colonial power relations, and how Latinx artists and activities have enacted visual forms of resistance.

Pimone Triplett and Charles LaPorte discuss how the poetic form from Terrance Hayes' "The Golden Shovel" grew out of deeper history of race and gender in America to help us better contextualize the famous Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "We Real Cool."