A Home for the Humanities

It has been a year of big changes at Trinity University.

This fall, this selective residential liberal arts institution of nearly 2,800 students will appear for the first time alongside the nation’s best liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings after reclassifying as a Baccalaureate Arts & Sciences institution.

And in September, Trinity will open a new academic building that’s unique not just on campus but in the greater San Antonio community.

Throughout all of these changes, one thing has remained constant: Trinity’s steadfast commitment to a distinctive liberal arts education combined with select pre-professional programs rooted in interdisciplinary discovery through hands-on experiences.

With an endowment of more than $1.7 billion, the university has the resources to provide a home for multiple humanities programs vital to Trinity’s signature interdisciplinary experience. Two examples — physics majors putting on a live stage show and computer science majors creating digital data for an archaeologist — show how Trinity students exemplify this interdisciplinary approach through the humanities. Trinity’s newest building, meanwhile, will be a visible symbol of the university’s commitment to the liberal arts.

“Trinity has long been a place where learning and discovery happens every minute of every day,” says Megan Mustain, Trinity University’s Provost and vice president for Academic Affairs. “With the construction of Dicke Hall, our campus has never been better equipped to support a new generation of cross-disciplinary endeavors in teaching, learning, and discovery.”

‘The Amazing Physics Show’

Physics is full of equations, rules — remember Newton’s three laws of motion? — and a lot of complex math.

For some, this complexity is art. For others, it’s just a ton of fun. In what other class might the professor climb onto a four-wheeled cart, set off a fire extinguisher, and fly across the room?

At Trinity, the death-defying physics professor is Nirav Mehta, who teaches a one-credit class designed to help upper-level physics majors improve their speaking skills.

“Communicating technical information in a way that people can understand is a ubiquitous skill,” said Mehta, an associate professor of physics. “Being able to communicate technical ideas to the general public is nowadays becoming even more important because science literacy is something that I think we really need to work on as a community.”

Normally, Mehta has his students talk in front of the class like they’re giving a technical presentation at a conference. This year, he tried something he has wanted to do for years: have his students perform physics live on stage.

The Amazing Physics Show, held one night only in May in a campus auditorium, starred Mehta and nine of his students. Trinity theater students assisted with stage design, lighting, and sound. But it was the students who designed the experiments, performed them on stage, and explained to the live audience what was happening.

The show was a blast — literally. There was an air cannon that knocked over a stack of Styrofoam cups and a liquid nitrogen mortar that fired corks across the stage. These physics majors spun a bicycle wheel gyroscope, crushed a metal drum by sucking out all the air, and ran a slight electrical charge (safely!) through audience volunteers.

After Mehta scooted across the stage in a fire extinguisher-powered cart, it was time for the big finish: To make a point about pressure and surface area, Mehta sandwiched himself between two beds of nails, and a cinder block placed on top of him was shattered with a sledgehammer.

Amber Graf, a rising junior, said The Amazing Physics Show reminded her of why she became interested in physics in the first place: because it’s fun.

“There's a lot of demystifying that we can do as far as what physics actually is and what a lot of these concepts are because physics is a scary word for a lot of people,” Graf said. “This is a really cool way to bridge the gap between what we do as physicists and what other people do.”

Trinity University physics professor Nirav Mehta demonstrates an air cannon to the delight of physics show audience members

Trinity University students perform fun and educational physics demonstrations live on stage during “The Amazing Physics Show”

Mehta and Trinity Student Angela Graf (left) give a moving performance while explaining physics concepts on stage

Classical studies professor Nicolle Hirschfield unlocks the secrets of the deep with help from Trinity University computer science students

Supercharging the study of shipwrecks

Imagine a tipped-over 18-wheeler that has dumped its load across the highway. A shipwreck is very similar — except that its contents are centuries old and scattered across the ocean floor, and it’s not entirely clear what was on the ship or where it all came from.

That’s the puzzle that Trinity professor Nicolle Hirschfeld is trying to solve. Hirschfeld, a professor of classical studies, has enlisted her students with computer science skills to help her map out and piece together fragments from shipwrecks. By taking an interdisciplinary approach to creating humanities data through digital means, Hirschfeld is hoping to learn more about the ancient ships that once plied the waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the southern coast of modern-day Turkey.

Hirschfeld’s research focuses on the cargo from a wooden ship that sank around 1200 BC. A scuba diver, Hirschfeld helped recover some of the Late Bronze Age artifacts — copper ingots, precious metals, and 130 pottery vessels — that lay more than 100 feet underwater.

About a decade ago, Hirschfeld showed her students some very simple maps of the shipwreck’s debris field. Traditionally, archaeologists like Hirschfeld have used sketches and photographs to piece together shattered pottery and other found items.

But one of her students, a freshman, said he could digitize the map. The “Humpty Dumpty Project,” as it was dubbed, was intended to show how the vases might have been stacked on board the ship.

This project “showed me what was possible and also showed me how wonderful the students here are,” Hirschfeld said.

Since then, several more of Hirschfeld’s students have developed more sophisticated digital mapping programs that can unlock the secrets of the depths.

Once the cargo is virtually reconfigured, Hirschfeld said, she can determine how it was loaded. (It’s just like a truck, she said: The items closest to the doors were probably loaded last.) That arrangement can suggest the ports the ship visited, the route it sailed, what it was carrying, and how many people were on board.

With this trove of digital information, “it makes it easier to observe patterns in the data and it then frees up the headspace and time to think about what those patterns mean,” Hirschfeld said. “It's super-powering what we used to do.”

A home for the humanities

Whether physics and theater, classics and computer science, or anything in between, Trinity University has always been a place where curious students can explore the humanities through an interdisciplinary lens.

This exploration will be bolstered in September with the newest addition to Trinity’s campus: a state-of-the-art building that showcases the university’s deep commitment to the humanities. Dicke Hall will be the first center dedicated to the humanities on both Trinity’s campus and in the greater San Antonio community.

The three-story, 40,000-square-foot building will be the new home for Trinity’s English and religion departments; the Mellon Initiative, which promotes undergraduate research in the arts and humanities; and the Humanities Collective, which coordinates and highlights faculty and students’ humanities research, events and programming at Trinity and throughout the city.

Dicke Hall will offer inviting spaces that foster interaction, collaboration, and partnerships between students and faculty in both liberal arts and professional programs. The building will have a lecture hall, screening room, collaborative commons space, and six ultramodern classrooms with moveable furniture, projection screens, and advanced acoustics.

The building sits at the new main entrance to campus and will provide a visible connection between Trinity and the San Antonio community. Perhaps as importantly, it symbolizes that the liberal arts is front and center of everything that Trinity does.

“Dicke Hall exemplifies how we can build spaces that are student-centered to adapt to our changing pedagogies through the years,” says Ruben Dupertuis, Ph.D., religion department chair and Dicke Hall project co-chair. “The students are excited–they feel the validation because the University cares about what they have decided to focus on, which is meaningful to them.”

The newly constructed Dicke Hall will be the first center dedicated to the humanities in San Antonio

Dicke Hall’s state-of-the-art mass timber construction system nods to the campus's tradition of engineering innovation and historic district status

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