Center for the Humanities builds empathy and understanding for veterans’ experiences.
Since its launch in 2023, the Center for the Humanities has been demonstrating that the College of Arts and Science’s commitment to the humanities includes academic progress and benefiting our wider community.
Among the center’s community projects is the Veterans Humanities Initiative, which began with recognizing that veterans' experiences are integral to understanding what it means to be human.
“The power of this work is in its value to all of us,” said Cooper Drury, Dean of the College of Arts and Science. “The humanities help us all to understand people better, so we can teach, collaborate with, and achieve more for each other.”
In April 2024, the initiative’s first event was a panel of four veterans who are prominent writers — essayist Jerri Bell, fiction writer and journalist Dewaine Farria, novelist Matt Gallagher, and the poet Brian Turner Moderated by Captain Drew Visscher, a graduate student in the MU Department of English and Captain in the U.S. Army Advanced Civil Schooling Program, the open dialog revealed how writing helps veterans process their military experiences.
“One of the main missions of the Center for the Humanities is to engage with the community by bringing arts and humanities to populations where arts and humanities don’t traditionally have a prominent role,” said Phong Nguyen, co-director of the Center for the Humanities and a professor in the College of Arts and Science.
In addition to building new and necessary initiatives, the Center for the Humanities also supports community partners who share the center’s goals. In the fall of 2024, the center joined MO Humanities for a veteran writing workshop.
The workshop served veterans and other military-connected community members throughout the state, helping them express difficult-to-articulate experiences and facets of identity through writing.
“By inviting veterans to open up, we as civilians can hear their perspectives and gain empathy and understanding,” said Lisa Carrico, program director for Missouri Humanities, “which is what the humanities are all about.”
Ahead of Veterans Day, the center will host a public lecture by David Kieran, Columbus State University Colonel Richard R. Hallock Distinguished University Chair in Military History. Kieran will shed light on the mental health crises the United States Army confronted during the Iraq War. The lecture will take place at 3:30 p.m. Friday, November 8, in 410 Jesse Hall and will be presented by the Center for the Humanities, the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and Peace Studies.