Edmund Harriss

Professor holding paper models speaks in front of steel sculpture.Edmund Harriss, clinical assistant professor, mathematical sciences, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. The heart of Edmund Harriss’ work with the Honors College is closely related to the reason he became an academic: to take his specialist knowledge and combine it with the expertise of other professors active in the many diverse fields represented at the university. In his first Honors College course, Place in Mind, he worked with landscape architecture Professor Carl Smith and students from a wide range of disciplines to encourage engagement with the courtyard outside the Honors College itself. The proposal produced by this course led him to partner with Emily Baker, assistant professor of architecture, to figure out a way to take his curvahedra forms from a palm-sized paper model to a 12-foot-diameter steel sculpture. Their fruitful collaboration has potential for sustainable innovation in concrete construction.

In Spring 2022, Harriss will join with rare books librarian Joshua Youngblood to lead a Signature Seminar on Euclid, using Euclid’s Elements as a window to explore geometry and the history of mathematics alongside the history of the book and the transmission of ideas over the last 2,300 years. He currently serves as an Honors College Dean’s Fellow.