The Center promotes understanding of the humanities and highlights their vital role in a vibrant, democratic society through a variety of public programs and initiatives, podcasts, and events.
Humanities in Action
Pursuing Justice and Preserving Open Debate
How do we balance our pursuit of a more just and equitable society with our desire to protect freedom of expression?
Calling on the Humanities in the Midst of a Pandemic
What role do the humanities play in confronting a crisis like COVID-19?
Loss, Grief, and the Humanities in the Time of Pandemic
The humanities demonstrate we are never alone in our experience, but are always caught up in recurring and collective cycles of life, death, and suffering.
100 Years and Counting: The Continuing Struggle for Gender Equality
As we observe the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, it’s clear that the march toward equality is far from over.
Humanities Moments
A National Reckoning
Contributors to this collection reflect on the long, and often overlooked, history of racial inequality with an eye towards how the humanities can help overcome past injustices.
Creating Shelter: Moments from Home
In this collection of moments, contributors imagine home as a place, a feeling, a set of relationships, and as a site of learning and personal growth.
Homeschooling and the Humanities
College freshman Isabella Kemp shares her self-realizations and new understandings gained through homeschooling family members during the quarantine.
Using Language to Humanize Healthcare
Dr. Michael Stanley celebrates a principle of healthcare that draws from philosophy, mythology, and literature to understand individuals and their circumstances.
Podcasts
Discovery and Inspiration
Podcast Series
What makes scholars so passionate about the subjects they pursue? What is it like for them to make a new discovery? To answer a confounding question? And what can we learn by taking the time to ask scholars about the research they are doing?
Activism Beyond the City: Women, Rural Communities, and the Struggle for Black Freedom
Katherine Mellen Charron (Fellow, 2019–20)
Charron discusses her research into the legacies of local, community-based, rural Black women’s activism in North Carolina.
Home Matters: Picturing and Understanding Place
Confronting contemporary challenges is impossible unless we understand the ways that humans interact with their environments and the repercussions those interactions have both locally and globally.
Excursions: Revisiting the History of the Caribbean
This podcast features conversations with several recent Fellows whose scholarship deals with the Caribbean and its relation to the Atlantic slave trade as well as a birthplace for not only revolutionary democracy but reggae music.
Events
The NHC’s Virtual Book Club Series: Race and Injustice
July 15–August 19, 2020
This installment in our virtual book club series features six gifted scholars whose work helps illuminate the long history, bitter realities, and complex dynamics surrounding racial oppression in the United States.
For Ourselves and Our Posterity: The U.S. Constitution, Then and Now
January and February, 2020
NHC Fellows discuss how their work helps us better understand the creation and living legacy of the U.S. Constitution as we endeavor to form a more perfect union.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden
November 19, 2019 at 6:00 pm
Cara Robertson (Fellow 2004–05; 2005–06) discusses one of the most famous trials in American history, offering not only a detailed account of events but a window into life in America’s Gilded Age.
Beyond Despair: Theory and Practice in Environmental Humanities
April 3–5, 2019
This unique three-day summit of environmental humanities scholars and experts from across the country featured a dynamic intersection between discussion, presentations, and exhibitions, grounded in practical site excursions.
Videos
NHC Virtual Book Club: “Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions”
Martin Summers (Fellow, 2013–14)
Summers charts the history of Saint Elizabeths hospital and demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of its existence.
NHC Virtual Book Club: “The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins”
Brenda E. Stevenson (Fellow, 2015–16)
Stevenson explores the long-simmering resentment within LA’s Black community that ultimately erupted in the 1992 LA Riots.
Educating Citizens and Reforming Generations
Alan Taylor (Fellow, 1993–94)
In the wake of the American Revolution, republican reliance on popular sovereignty complicated efforts by elites to improve voters through education.
An Evening with Seymour Hersh
NHC Public Event
Seymour “Sy” Hersh, one of our nation’s most important investigative journalists, discusses his most recent book, Reporter: A Memoir.
