The Humanities Program at UNC Asheville is a required interdisciplinary  sequence of four courses required of all students and taught by faculty from across the university. Each course has its own Reader of primary material, but these were created independently of each other at different times. As the course curricula were revised,  the Readers became less representative and more course content was posted on our digital learning platform, where it was accessible to students only while they were enrolled in a particular course and effectively fire-walled from any public view.

In 2017, thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the HUM Program began a revision of the Readers for the first three HUM courses: HUM 124: The Ancient World; HUM 214: Communities and Selves, 300-1700 CE; and HUM 324: The Enlightenment to the Modern World. Six editors, two per Reader and representing six different disciplines, are working to revise all three Readers at the same time. We are working on all together to enhance the consonance of questions, themes, historical developments, and other areas where connections can be drawn. Our primary goal is to make these Readers as useful for student learning as we can, and to that end, we will use data gleaned from surveys of faculty and students and regular consultation of past and current instructors in the HUM Program.

UNC Press has agreed to publish our Readers. We are working to make them open access texts in North Carolina. We also want them make them revisable at regular intervals of two to three years.

The purpose of this blog is to record our progress and make it as outward facing as we can; to be open to questions and comments throughout; and to provide a site where our thoughts, discussions, and disagreements, as well as our conclusions and concrete decisions, can be archived and searched.