The development of an undergraduate course to explore the question, What is human dignity?

Glenn Hughes and Megan Mustain, professors of philosophy at St. Mary's University, develop a course open to all undergraduates on the question, What is human dignity? The course invites students to reflect on the significance of the idea of human dignity as one that is both ubiquitous in the public discourse of our time and also intimately linked to the Catholic liberal arts tradition that informs the vision and culture of St. Mary's University. It is structured around four historical periods: classical, medieval and Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern/contemporary. The first section raises the central issue of whether dignity should be identified with wealth, status, pleasure, and the trappings of power - and if not, with what characteristics or capacities it should be associated. The second section turns to medieval and Renaissance conceptions of human dignity. In the third section, modern secular articulations of the meaning of human dignity come to the foreground. In the fourth section, students explore how recent political crises have brought the question of human dignity to prominence in various contemporary artistic, political, philosophical and religious responses to it. Readings for the course include the book of Job, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Martha Nussbaum's Women and Human Development, and Gabriel Marcel's "Techniques of Degradation." To complement the readings, two documentaries, "Eyes on the Prize" and "Shoah," stimulate student discussions about human rights and human dignity.

My book project expands the current field of political, economic, and institutional histories of the Gulag, and offers a cultural history of the Stalinist camps. The book is focused on a few select topics that reveal some of the more distinctive, yet largely overlooked, camp practices and features of everyday life. I shift attention from the Gulag's economic rationale and political prisoners, to the Gulag's broad societal impact and systemic violence. Throughout the various chapters, I highlight the ways in which the violence of everyday life proved to be extensive, routine, and inherent in the labor camp system's design. In this way, I situate the Gulag in the broader academic discussions concerning state terror and crimes against humanity.

My project uses biography to understand the generation that made the Russian Revolution. Sofia Panina was one of Russia's greatest heiresses and a pioneering social reformer. She rose to unusual political prominence in 1917 when she became the only woman minister in the Provisional Government, then the defendant in the Bolsheviks' first political trial. Fleeing Russia in 1920, she contributed to the development of international refugee relief and emigre institutions. My book is the first scholarly effort to reconstruct Panina's life from widely scattered archival sources in Russia, Europe, and the U.S. I analyze her significance as a woman who constructed innovative institutions while resisting social and gender conventions. My book also examines why she has been appropriated as a political symbol at times of transition, both in the past and in Russia today. The audience for my book includes historians of Russia, women, and reform movements, and general readers.

A study of selected Russian novelists since the time of Pushkin, with a view toward describing both the particularly Russian characteristics of this literature and its qualities as a bridge between nations and generations.

To study Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's tendency to write in code through an examination of his first work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, revealing the code and the pressure of Soviet censorship.

To support the publication of a study of the moral issues raised in six classicworks of Russian literature.