For Humanities Students, a Lab of Their Own

What Butler heard from these students inspired him to create a new kind of course, one focused on the humanities and oriented around open-ended and communal research. He and Gabrielle Dean, a librarian and curator of rare books and manuscripts, created the Classics Research Lab, which is both a curricular idea and a physical space — a room deliberately chosen for its public orientation, looking out into the atrium of Gilman Hall, an academic building in the center of the university’s Homewood campus.