Kent State University’s College of Arts and Sciences will
host a four-day international conference on the humanities
from July 9-12 at the Kent State Hotel and Conference
Center.

Kent State University’s College of Arts and Sciences will host a four-day international conference on the humanities at the Kent State Hotel and Conference Center at 215 S. Depeyster St. in downtown Kent.

The conference, "Why the Humanities: Answers from the Cognitive and Neurosciences," will take place July 9-12 and features cutting-edge, empirical research demonstrating the ways that education in the humanities develops cognitive and emotional capabilities that are crucial for personal well-being, responsible global citizenship and social justice.

The conference is free and open to Kent State faculty, staff and students. Registration is requested, but not required. The conference is made possible, in part, by the Ohio Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Recent studies in the cognitive and neurosciences indicate how humanities education can develop the following key cognitive and emotional capabilities:

• Empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling
• Mind-reading, the ability to understand the thoughts and intentions of others
• Metacognition, the ability to monitor and regulate one’s own perceptions and judgments of others
• Bias correction, the ability to compensate for distortions in one’s judgments of others
• Self-knowledge, the ability to recognize troublesome traits or motives in oneself
• Self-other overlap recognition, the ability to apprehend similarities between oneself and others who appear very different from oneself
• Moral judgment, the ability to form accurate and fair assessments of oneself and of others
  

“This event is part of an ongoing project of Kent State’s Social Cognition Research Group, a team of faculty from English, history, modern and classical language studies, philosophy, psychological sciences and sociology, that is conducting empirical research into the neurocognitive developments that humanities education can foster,” says Mark Bracher, Ph.D., Kent State professor of English and conference co-organizer.

For additional information including registration information, visit the conference website at www.kent.edu/cas/why-humanities or contact the conference organizers at whythehumanities@gmail.com.