At the beginning of every fall, I feel a sense of excitement with the start of the academic year. It is autumn, a season symbolizing both culmination and decline, a time for harvest and preparation for the coming winter. And, yet, given how long I have been in academia, this time of year primarily signals a sense of renewal and promise.
I am starting my 9th year as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the 6th year of directing the Humanities Center. It is an honor to support the research and scholarship of our faculty and students and to find ways to illuminate the significance of the humanities for public audiences.
This year, I selected the theme of “Imagining Futures, Revisioning Pasts” to hopefully inspire thought experiments and reflections about what might be possible for ourselves and our collective societies.
One of my favorite books is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The idea that one might travel across space via a wrinkle (a tesseract) is fascinating. But even more intriguing to me, as I revisited the book over the years that I have aged, are the central issues of empathy and connection.
One of the characters that our protagonist, Meg, meets on her journey to find her father is Aunt Beast. She is both maternal and differently embodied. She also has a unique mental and emotional capacity of being able to read Meg’s mind and to comfort her. The connection between them crosses the boundaries that we tend to draw between our intellect and our emotions, between our physical and mental states. Aunt Beasts help us to imagine not only possible alternative worlds but alternative beings.
So, what might we learn if we ask questions together? In envisioning the time yet to come…
- How does it alter the way we understand our past and our possibilities?
- What persists or changes?
- In ourselves, our communities, and our environment?
- What are our hopes and fears?
Join us in imagining futures and revisioning pasts [webpage].
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Associate Dean in the School of Humanities of Research, Faculty Development, and Public Engagement
Faculty Director of the Humanities Center
Professor of History and Asian American Studies
Faculty Profile
Learn more about Professor Wu and her research:
Centering the human experience: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu to lead UCI Humanities Center [link]
(UCI School of Humanities News, 9/10/2020)
Title IX's legacy at 50: UCI professor pens first biography of Patsy Mink, author of Title IX [link]
(UCI School of Humanities News, 4/14/2022)