Welcome to the website for the Louie’s Legacy project, a multi-year endeavor by students at Northern Arizona University under the direction of Dr. Becky Pratt-Sturges in the department of Comparative Cultural Studies. This multi-year in progress endeavor includes contributions from undergraduate students in HUM 195 Humanities in Action, a public humanities course, during academic year 2019-2020. This project is the first part of a student-driven website devoted to the history of NAU in partnership with Special Collections and Archives and a re-imagining of an earlier site created by graduate students in public history at NAU. Students worked in small teams to research and exhibit university history through digital storytelling. The project emphasizes civic engagement as well as critical thinking and creativity through the development of a digital exhibition which will incorporates interpretation, multi-media, and digital technology.
Louie’s Legacy Interns
Upper-division student interns continue to work on this project under the direction of Dr. Pratt-Sturges as part of their minors in Museum Studies in the department of Comparative Cultural Studies. During Fall 2020, CCS major Emily Morgan revised and edited several pages as part of refining the site for public use in the future.
About HUM 195
HUM 195, Humanities in Action, is an introduction to the Public Humanities, an area of study that examines how people apply humanistic learning to public life and how they use public/virtual spaces to process and document the human experience. This course explores in particular the choices made in the public interaction with the humanities and emphasize the ways in which universities and museums can practice “engaged” scholarship with their communities through but not limited to publications for a wide audience, exhibitions, performances, online and social media, digital projects, interpretative programming, and collaborative community projects. Through careful reading and exploring of a variety of resources, including guest speakers, event attendance, virtual site visits, etc., we discuss not only what the public humanities are, but the issues facing public humanists today such as the role we have in the preservation, interpretation, and presentation of culture. We pay particular attention to the intersections between activism and research and the connections between the humanities and civic engagement. This course is interdisciplinary in nature and we will think about and find answers to these questions together by engaging with a variety of case studies through which we will explore the many mediums and areas of focus for the public humanities.
