Innovation, creativity, and imagination lead to personal growth, professional success, and world-changing discoveries. Arts & Sciences encourages students to engage creatively, explore fresh ideas, and employ innovative approaches within and beyond the classroom. We want students to be excited about the ways in which their coursework relates to the real-world and feel welcome and included in all disciplines—and future careers. Here are some spaces where our students—and faculty—honed their creativity—in and out of the classroom—during the past year.

Modernizing the English Major
“The new major is designed to introduce a diverse range of voices into the curriculum right at the beginning. This better matches the rest of our course offerings as a department, which have diversified in recent years. The course itself is fairly experimental — we hope it will be a new way to engage canonical works of literature, from Beowulf to the present.” –Joseph Rezek on BU’s new co-taught course in the English major, Associate Professor of English, Director of the American & New England Studies Program

Demystifying Child Anxiety
“Child anxiety is one of the most prevalent and impairing problems that children and adolescents face, and by developing psychological interventions for these problems, there is so much potential to have a positive impact on people’s lives. Furthermore, by engaging community partners (school nurses, educators, pediatricians, etc.) we can collaboratively develop new ways to expand access to care.” –Donna Pincus, Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Director of the BU Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program

Unraveling the Numeric of Knitting
“I’m always thinking about how to reach a broad audience with math and talk about math to a lot of people and get especially young people excited about math. It’s a professional interest of mine to help people see how math is fun and interesting and not dry and boring.” –Li-Mei Lim on the Mathalchemy art exhibition, Research Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Unearthing a Long-Ignored African Writing System
“Sources of African history have been European sources, primarily. But this is the first time we have a substantial number of documents produced by Africans dealing with those same issues on which their history has been written. And at BU, we are the leaders in this effort: we have documented over 30,000 pages from Africa.” –Ngom Fallou, Professor of Anthropology