The State of the Arts and Humanities: A Conversation with Nils Roemer

Creative Disturbance

Our guest on this episode of the podcast is Nils Roemer, interim dean of the School of the Arts and Humanities, director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor in Holocaust Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas.

In this podcast:

The timing of the transition to online learning (1:00) — The importance of engagement, closeness, proximity in humanities education (2:45) — Adapting to the technology of Microsoft Teams, online classes (5:15) — How to connect globally, across other borders and barriers, the importance of diversity (6:45) — After four successful searches, new tenure-track faculty coming to the School of Arts and Humanities (9:00) — Finding opportunity at moments of crisis and change (10:00) — Counteracting the compartmentalized, segregated model of knowledge (11:00) — Students are looking for some way to make different models compatible with one another; to make connections among disciplines (11:45) — Why students from Management or Computer Science are attracted to the arts and humanities (12:30) — Coffee houses as spaces of knowledge: the physician sitting next to the creative writer in Vienna (14:00) — Newest developments at the Ackerman Center: Developing an online MA in Holocaust and Human Rights Education (16:15) — Current project on Central European Jewish travel, from the 1880s to the immediate postwar period, considering the concepts of the flaneur, as well as class, nationality and ethnicity (17:45) — Upcoming project on how the Holocaust evolved dynamically after 1941 (19:00)