Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Guest Editor’S Introduction: Liah Greenfeld And The Future Of Comparative Civilizational Studies, Monika Monika, Guest Editor

Comparative Civilizations Review

Every scholarly life leaves behind unfinished questions. Professor Liah Greenfeld was acutely aware of this. Throughout a career spanning more than four decades, her research never settled into the repetition of established arguments. Each major work emerged from the unresolved problems of the previous one, enlarging both the scope of its inquiry and the range of disciplines with which it engaged. Nationalism led her to questions of modernity (Greenfeld, 1992) and the foundations of economic development (Greenfeld, 2001). The growth of the modern economy and the emerging new forces of globalization, in turn, raised broader questions about the self and …

In Memoriam: Liah Greenfeld A Reflection From The President Of The Comparative Civilizations Forum, Bibi Pelić

Comparative Civilizations Review

It is with sorrow and gratitude that the Comparative Civilizations Forum dedicates this special 2026 Fall issue of the Comparative Civilizations Review to the memory of Professor Liah Greenfeld, who passed away in May of this year.

Professor Liah Greenfeld was a sociologist, an anthropologist, a political scientist — and more than any single label can hold. Across four decades at Harvard and then at Boston University, she built a body of work, from Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity to The Spirit of Capitalism to Mind, Modernity, Madness, that stepped outside the boundaries the modern academy likes to draw. …

Liah Greenfeld: Scholar, Thinker, Friend, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

Professor Liah Greenfeld and I met several years ago when she submitted an article to the Comparative Civilizations Review. Her thoughtful demeanor and personal kindness to all were quickly evident, but so, too, was her scholarship, especially her probing theories of state, society, and civilization.

The Rending Of The Temple Curtain In The Gospel Of Luke: Its Relocation And Implications, Kim Kai Chan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rending of the temple curtain at Jesus’s death is recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels, yet Luke relocates the event from after to before Jesus’s death, creating interpretive challenges. While Mark connects the curtain’s tearing to the rending of the heavens at Jesus’s baptism through the verb σχίζω, this study argues that Luke reframes the tearing motif by linking the curtain’s rending to the tearing of the new garment in the parables of Luke 5:36–39, likewise employing σχίζω.

On the one hand, these parables in Luke 5 represent Jesus’s reasoning with his critics that to resist him and his …

Examining Transcultural Approaches In Art Education: Transversality, Identity Formation, And Intercultural Understanding, Alexandra Grace Parsons

Master's Theses

Art education is often treated as marginal within formal schooling, valued as enrichment rather than recognized as a vital contributor to students' intellectual, cultural, and emotional development. Funding and policy decisions made by state and local bodies produce significant regional disparities in access to art education across the United States. This thesis examines how transcultural approaches to art education can respond to increasingly diverse, post-migrant school communities. Using a comparative qualitative case study design, the study analyzes program structures, partnership models, and pedagogical practices at Birmingham Arts School in the United Kingdom alongside schools within Fulton County and Atlanta Public …

Ssw 701.50: Social Welfare Policy, Ian G. Williams

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is an Open Educational Resources (OER) remixed version of SSW 701.50: Social Welfare Policy, which is taught at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. This version updated the content and integrated additional OER materials, as part of the Summer 2026 cohort of The Open Knowledge Fellowship at the Mina Rees Library. It is a Zero-Textbook (ZTC) cost course and integrates materials from a range of academic disciplines. Official course description is as follows:

"This foundation course furnishes you with the orienting knowledge and skills needed to examine social welfare policies and to understand their relevance …

Witchcraft Dialogues : Anthropological And Philosophical Exchanges, George Clement Bond, Diane M. Ciekawy

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the occult. It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of witchcraft and sorcery and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences.

While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of witchcraft as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that witchcraft encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and …

From Margins To Center: Los Deslenguados In The Borderlands, Brissa S. Porras Villalobos

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Borderland literature is a subgenre that often includes narratives of migration, tribulations, identity development, and resilience. It foregrounds the collaboration of vulnerability, isolation, connection, and power, showing that hybridity is a source of cultural energy. Acknowledging the borderland and its culture is crucial because it challenges stereotypes, validates marginalized voices, and celebrates heritage in all its complexity. By centering these experiences, borderland literature affirms the potential of living between cultures, prioritizing the recognition of the in-between, valuing and celebrating the space where identities are continually reshaped, histories are reclaimed, and resilience is nurtured rather than neglected. Using Gloria Anzaldúa's theory …

Genocide As Patriotic Duty: The Outcomes Of Ultranationalism And Dehumanization From World War Ii Genocide Orchestrators, Corie R. Blais

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The thesis provides a contribution to the field of history how nationalism

often transforms individuals during wartime to become dehumanizing

ultranationalists through patriotism and its connection to genocide.  Also, it gives

insight into the many ways that genocide orchestrators during World War II,

relied on propaganda of racism, religion, and “othering” in order to justify their

incentives to expand territories and dehumanize victims through medical

experimentations and sexual violence.  While research materials in the context of

Nazi Germany were ample, one challenge in my research was finding

documentations on Stalin’s People Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD)

police unit which carried …

Opening The Lantern: The Leiden Declaration, Mark Huber

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics provides insight into how mathematicians view their discipline. However, when positioning mathematics against AI, the declaration falls short in recognizing recent advances. This column introduces the reader who might be unfamiliar with these new methods through the formal language Lean and discusses how these new abilities might change the way journals operate.

Wanted: A Book Reviews Editor For The Journal Of Humanistic Mathematics, Mark Huber, Gizem Karaali

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

To help us procure regular book review submissions and ensure that we can indeed include a solid book review in each upcoming issue, we would like to have an enthusiastic book worm join our small editorial team. In other words, we are looking for a book reviews editor.

We will review all applications that have been submitted by October 15, 2026. We hope to have our new book reviews editor start their term by January 2027.

Visualizing Irrationality: Digit Mosaics In Okabe–Ito, Raven Quilestino-Olario

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Five visual mosaics translate 10,000-digit segments of well-known mathematical constants into color. For each constant, the digits are placed in a 100×100 grid read left to right and top to bottom, including the digit before the decimal point, and each digit (0–9) is mapped to a color in the Okabe–Ito palette. A matching bar chart shows the digit counts within the same window, allowing quick comparison of how evenly digits appear. The series includes π, e, √2, φ, and the Euler–Mascheroni constant γ. Together, the mosaics and counts turn numerical randomness into visual harmony while keeping the work readable for …

The Pi-Royal Tire, Erik Talvila

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this humorous story, the half-wit proprietor of a tire manufacturing company thinks knowing pi to more digits will allow the production of rounder tires. An applied mathematician is recruited to fulfill a ridiculous industrial research agenda.

In Praise Of Smaller Models, Pedro Poitevin

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Count, Robin Young

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

It's the thought that counts? No, it's this canzone that counts! This poem explores the philosophy of counting through five stanzas from shoreline pebbles to Godel's incompleteness theorems. Counting becomes our guide through Zeno's paradoxes, irrational numbers, Cantor's infinities, and quantum measurement problems. The poem counts, recounts, and discovers that some things simply cannot be counted.

Group Theory For Poets, Holley Friedlander

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This poem instructs the reader on how to put a group structure on an arbitrarily chosen set. Through accentual, rhyming verse, it playfully discusses the beauty and utility of groups as a mathematical concept via examples and applications. This work is inspired by the Patricia Toht book, Pick a Pine Tree.

My Journey To Mathematics, Thao Thuan Vu Ho

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

A Lament For Linear Algebra, Jasmine A. Elmrabti

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

What assumptions underlie our axiomatic definitions? A meditation on the nature of linear algebra and its metaphysical implications during use, this poem is a reflection on the markedness of discrete entities upon which we rely to utilize the axioms of linear algebra.

Mathematics As Creative Structure: A Review Of Marcus Du Sautoy’S Blueprints, Sangeetha Balakrishnan, Latha R

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Marcus du Sautoy’s Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity (2025) makes a provocative claim that creativity emerges not in opposition to constraint, but through it. Working through nine mathematical “blueprints” — symmetry, randomness, the Fibonacci sequence, among others — du Sautoy traces recurring structural patterns across artistic practice, natural phenomena, and mathematical thought. The argument is ambitious and persuasive. In this review we consider what the book adds to longstanding conversations about the relationship between scientific and humanistic ways of knowing, and reflect on what it means to reframe mathematics as an imaginative and exploratory enterprise rather than a purely technical …

The Logic Of Leaves: Mathematical Poems And Graphs, Ksawery Tomczak

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This collection explores the intersection of mathematics and poetry through six original works that blend formal rigor with lyrical expression. Each poem draws from a distinct mathematical concept—proof, set theory, combinatorics, graph theory, and cardinality—reframing it through metaphoric and aesthetic lenses. From the lyrical contemplation of infinite sets to the emotive longing of a graph in love, the verses reveal the emotional resonance and philosophical depth embedded in mathematical thought. The collection culminates in a visual piece rendered in \LaTeX and TikZ, illustrating all integer partitions of the number five as a branching tree, accompanied by a poem that sings …

An Essay On Teaching And Learning Mathematics: Through The Lens Of Artificial Intelligence, Music, And Sports, James Diederich

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This essay is aimed at a wide audience: anyone who has engaged in learning or teaching math. It provides a unique perspective drawn from a mathematician’s interests in working with K-12 teachers, familiarity with artificial intelligence (AI), and amateur pursuits of learning to play an instrument and of learning a difficult sport. While I delve into these topics, no special background is needed in the slightest. In particular, I draw lessons from some failures in AI that reflect on why the conventional procedural approach to teaching and learning math fails many students. I also provide insight into how we learn …

The Urysohn Lemma: Munkres Variation, Irida Altman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

There is a tradition of Mathematics contributing to the understanding of Music. This article sets out to contribute in the other direction. It uses musical sensibilities to feel its way through a piece of mathematics called the Urysohn Lemma, suggesting the presence of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic elements within standard proving practices of contemporary Western mathematics. This article employs a literary-philosophical technique of viewing a text in one discipline (mathematics) through the conceptual lens of another (music). As such, this article reports on no experiments—reading the article is the experiment. Each reader performs it for themselves.

Prime Numbers Are Written On Your Hand: You Simply Have Not Been Counting Correctly, Nona Servais Kamdem Simo, Awa Traore

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Prime numbers have resisted systematic description for over two millennia. We propose that part of the difficulty may lie in an insufficiently attentive examination of one’s own hands. In particular, we assign the natural numbers to the joints of the human hand according to a cyclic traversal protocol, and make a handful of observations which can naturally be translated into number-theoretic properties of prime numbers. We show that these properties lead us to natural activation thresholds of a unified three-phase sieve algorithm — the resulting framework provides, for the first time, a zone-based partition of the admissible space with explicit …

Developing A Learner-Centered Teaching Routine, Hyeeun Jang

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This paper shares my story of developing, from Fall 2022 to Spring 2025, a learner-centered teaching routine for my undergraduate mathematics courses. I use four steps: an opening question, a short mini lecture about meaning, structured small group work, and a short end-of-class exit check, at times supported by quick visuals in Mathematica and, when useful, Python. Instead of relying on extended traditional lectures, the routine emphasizes collaborative problem solving and invites students to articulate and check their reasoning together. I used this routine mainly in my elementary statistics classes, but also in calculus and linear algebra. The evidence I …

Preparing Undergraduates To Philosophize With Children About Mathematics, Lawrence M. Lesser

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This paper shares my reflections and insights from preparing and facilitating a session in a weeklong inaugural study away program for undergraduate students (especially philoophy majors). My session was a vehicle for helping these students experience or visualize how the program’s Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach could be applied to exploring and discussing mathematics with children.

The Dynamics Of Vincent Van Gogh, Monica Morales Hernandez

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article explores the interplay between Vincent van Gogh’s distinctive artistic style and principles of fluid dynamics, particularly through metaphorical comparisons. Van Gogh’s swirling, turbulent brushstrokes in works such as The Starry Night and Wheatfield with Crows evoke the chaotic and dynamic behaviors found in fluid motion, like vortices and turbulence. Although there is no documented scientific influence from fluid dynamics on van Gogh’s art, the parallels between his emotive, flowing techniques and the mathematical principles governing fluid behavior offer a unique lens to appreciate both his artistic innovation and the science of fluid dynamics.

Mathematicians Against The Tide, Nicola Ciccoli

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematicians in popular culture are often depicted as people obsessed by their studies but with little connection to society, poor social skills, mental issues and narrow interests, and more generally a dull life. Adding to these explicit stereotypes, subtler and more implicit ones also abound, regarding mathematicians’ gender, ethnicity, age; they are all supposed to be white middle-aged men. In this paper I describe a project aimed at disrupting such stereotypes that culminated in a book containing short comics and biographies of twentieth-century mathematicians that were, with respect to the perceived image of mathematicians, against the tide.

Waiting For The Magic: A Historical And Mathematical Study Of Queues In Disney Theme Parks, Nina E. Becket

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This paper, written as part of an honors research project in high school, provides an introduction to the line and queuing systems at Disney theme parks. We begin with a brief history of Disney World and its creators. We then introduce the basics of queuing theory and queuing notation. Finally, we examine modern line systems at Disney (as of 2023) and the future of its different queue systems.

An Exploration Of Mathematical And Musical Connections, Jeffrey Pair, Egypt Pannell, Dani Rodriguez, Jerico Sarmiento

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this paper, we present an introduction to some of the mathematical principles underlying music and mathematically develop a connection between the twelve musical notes and the group of integers modulo twelve. Our discussion touches on the simple mathematical ratios used to calculate consonant musical tones on the length of a string, the frequencies of tones and the method by which the twelfth root of two provides the foundation of equal temperament tuning, some algebraic connections to musical concepts like the euphonious circle of fifths, and a curious connection to twin primes.

"Math Is Like A Rollercoaster": Exploring Math Similes And Metaphors, Carmen M. Latterell, Janelle L. Wilson

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this article we explore the metaphors and similes that pre-service elementary teachers use to describe mathematics. Employing qualitative content analysis, we separately coded the metaphors and similes into conceptual categories and analyzed themes that emerged. This grounded theory approach led to the creation of seven categories of metaphors and similes and three overarching themes. Math was viewed as a journey, a puzzle, a personal experience, a creative process, an algorithm, infinite, and an embodied process. Pre-service elementary teachers viewed mathematics as a process that takes effort. Overall, mathematics is a positive experience for them. In addition, mathematics involves fitting …