David Cooper recognizes the importance of engaging communities through the arts and humanities. As director of MSU’s Public Humanities Collaborative, he works to connect community groups to the humanities.
The collaborative started in 2006 as a way for faculty, students and community partners to develop campus-community relationships. It creates a cultural environment by examining the public purposes of scholarly work. The collaborative started with about a dozen faculty members and has grown to include about 500 from all departments on campus.
Cooper’s interest in public humanities stems from the works of Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist who taught at Harvard University. Cooper admired his role as a scholar and writer.
Cooper will publish this spring a collection of 18 biographical profiles Coles wrote throughout his career. For the title, Cooper borrowed a line from a poem by William Carlos Williams “Lives We Carry with Us: Profiles of Moral Courage by Robert Coles.”
“We carry with us people in profound ways that not only influence our identity but are the building blocks of our identity,” he said. “These contacts with people aren’t merely paths crossing in a blank universe by chance, but they are purposeful in making us the people that we are.”
Cooper is working with the Special Collections librarians to house a donation of archival material from Coles. The archive, which includes more than 1 million items including book manuscripts, research notes and letters, will soon be available to the public.
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