Featured Research Archives | National Humanities Center

Featured Research

Fellows at the National Humanities Center explore an astonishingly diverse array of topics, touching on people, events, and ideas across time and geography.

Below you'll find Fellows sharing a little about how they were inspired to pursue the subjects they study, insights they've gained through their research, and how their work contributes to their disciplines and to our understanding of the human experience.

%customfield(subject)%

Featured Research: Balancing the Scales

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the pursuit of justice, both criminal and social, in a variety of contexts and through diverse means—governmental investigations, courts, artistic protest, and the development of communities united by shared experiences of discrimination.

D.T. Suzuki

Featured Research: Changing Perspectives

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects reexamine historical actors, events, and eras by shifting the perspectives through which they’ve previously been viewed. They encourage us to assume a different point of view and to consider previously unnoticed aspects revealed about the lives of their subjects.

photo of modernist architecture

Featured Research: City, Town, Village

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects explore the human experience through the lens of settled spaces, revealing new insights about the importance of place in understanding the human experience.

%customfield(subject)%

Featured Research: Affect, Perception, and Reality

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the ways that lived experience is colored, configured, and interpreted. These scholars are exploring the ways that thought, feeling, and custom produce subjective lenses through which we encounter the world and extract meaning.

lake with reeds

Featured Research: Responding to a Changing World

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the ways that humans and environments act upon one another, challenging people physically, culturally, and ethically to commune, negotiate, innovate, and adapt.

%customfield(subject)%

Featured Research: Music and Its Uses

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the role that music plays in shaping lives. From churches in medieval Iberia to movie houses in the Soviet bloc to the streets and dancehalls of New Orleans and Nigeria, these scholars are examining music’s profound power to reveal and reimagine the world around us.

collage of images cut from magazines

Featured Research: Female Authorship

This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects focus on the voices of women, from medieval hagiographers to contemporary rappers, exploring the ways that an author’s gender influences her perspective—across genres, eras, and geographies.