The Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) is an independent, not-for-profit, cultural and educational organization that hosts an annual fall humanities festival by the same name. The fall festival is the largest and most distinguished of the organization’s endeavors and the center around which the rest of the year’s programs revolve. CHF hosted its 18th annual “festival of ideas” from Oct. 27-Nov. 11. This year’s theme was “The Climate of Concern.”

Festival programs are hosted and co-sponsored by many of Chicago’s most famous cultural institutions. The CHF website claims that the festival is a place where “established and emerging talents” in the humanities gather for intellectual “collaboration, cooperation and dialogue.” It is also a place where the general public may participate in educational programs geared toward civic engagement through the humanities.

Monmouth College started sending students to the Festival five years ago after the CHF announced to faculty advisors for the ACM Newberry Seminar in the Humanities that they would now provide up to four students from each ACM school with lodging and all-access passes to the Festival. Mark Willhardt, associate professor of English, is Monmouth’s Newberry advisor and has served as faculty sponsor for the Festival every year. Willhardt mentioned that this is one of the few opportunities for undergraduates to be taken seriously as scholars by the academic community.

To select students for the trip, Willhardt solicits the chairs of the humanities departments for nominations of “seniors who have distinguished themselves in and across the humanities.”  This year’s students, seniors Shannon Slee, Caleb Burrill and Jennifer Drendel, formed a representative body of the humanities at Monmouth College. Slee is an English and Spanish secondary education double major, Drendel is a history secondary education major and Burrill is a public relations major and philosophy minor.

The group left early on the morning of Friday, Nov. 2 and returned on Sunday, Nov. 4.  The students spent two nights at Chicago’s international youth hostel. They attended a couple of big breakfasts with other students from across the ACM and the Associated Colleges of Illinois (ACI). Their final breakfast was on the same day as the awards presentation for the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize; this year’s recipient, American author E.L. Doctorow, was an unexpected guest at the breakfast, where he socialized with the students and their sponsors. 

The list of speakers for the four week event is long and impressive. There were almost two dozen programs available each day while the Monmouth group was there and over 120 programs total for the two week festival. Slee says, “One impression that I had was the almost overwhelming nature of the festival; there were just so many interesting things to do that we weren’t able to do them all!”

Both Drendel and Slee cited Neil Hanson’s presentation on the London fire of 1666 as a favorite trip memory. Hanson used modern forensic techniques to illuminate and interrogate the circumstances and aftermath of the Great Fire of London. Burrill was partial to a four person, ensemble reading of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” He said, “The cryptic poem has always resonated strongly within me, seeing it brought to life was truly special.”

Willhardt said that students at Monmouth College often feel as if they are isolated in the middle of a cornfield, but there is this internationally famous event just a train ride away.

“It was a unique experience that allowed us to not only listen to some of the best in their fields but also interact with them through question and answer sessions and book signings,” Drendel said.

Slee added, “I think students need to always keep an open mind about opportunities like this one; even if they’re unsure of the benefit they might get out of a convocation, an unknown speaker’s presentation or a crack-of-dawn trip to Chicago, they should jump on board and make the most out of every opportunity.”

It seems that Burrill has internalized the spirit and message of the festival; he encouraged his peers to view the current climate crisis through the eyes of an artist: “If they for an instant could see beyond the political rhetoric which seeks to objectify and depersonalize nature it might elicit from within them a strong emotional response and a need for activism; a response that they perhaps didn’t even know that they housed.”

Return to Home -- Return to News