Equipment for Living and Dying: Engaged Humanities in Diverse Environments

This essay contemplates critically and traces literally my entanglement in varied forms of engaged humanities across my roles as an administrator, student, scholar, teacher, and human being. The essay opens with the genesis of the 2006 ICR conference on “Engaged Romanticism” and concludes with four specific yet diverse projects that reflect the breadth of possibilities that open up when one simply strives to be awake at work, wherever that work occurs. All these efforts are critically grounded in Goethe’s insistence on the transmutation of knowing into application and the methods proposed by Kenneth Burke in his vision of the capacity for the arts and sciences to serve as equipment for living (and, in my extension, dying).