The historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who solicited and organized this set of five case studies, explains in her introduction to them that their intent is to bypass the currently popular and unsupported claim that the humanities have practical relevance and, instead, to offer ruminative descriptions of what happens when teachers and students meet to discuss texts and objects. She explains that the essays report in detail on five individual classes in five very different academic settings, in the hope of helping (...) to turn the international anglophone conversation about humanistic education away from utilitarian, presentist, all-inclusive claims and toward a demonstration of what the humanities do in practice. (shrink)

A contribution to a set of case studies, titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this essay describes a course on the deep history of Italy developed for a “semester abroad” program in Perugia during the spring of 2016. It describes, in particular, two class meetings in the middle of the term that focused on the use of DNA, archaeology, and anthropology to study the lives of seven women who are the ancestors of almost every European today, as “imagined” by the geneticist (...) Bryan Sykes in his book The Seven Daughters of Eve. These women lived between forty-five hundred and ten thousand years ago—from the period when glaciers expanded to cover much of the northern hemisphere until the “Neolithic revolution,” when, in the wake of the glaciers' retreat, people turned permanently to farming. The student-led discussions, reconstructed here, of the lives of these women show the value of addressing questions of deep history in an international setting, where the intersections and disjunctions of the global and the local are especially evident. (shrink)