University of Florida
University of Connecticut
University of California, Los Angeles
Stony Brook University
Michael S. Gorham is professor of Russian studies at the University of Florida. He served for 12 years as associate editor, in charge of literature and culture, at Russian Review, one of the field’s top three peer-reviewed journals internationally. Gorham is the author of two award-winning books on language, culture, and politics: After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (Cornell University Press, 2014) and Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). He has recently published articles devoted to the political and rhetorical impact of trolls, hackers, blogging bureaucrats, tweeting presidents, dictators on Instagram, Alexey Navalny on YouTube, and the rhetorical strategies of Putin propagandists in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Gorham has given numerous invited public lectures on the politics of the Russian internet and social media, served as a regular contributor to the Oxford Analytica Daily Brief on matters relating to Russian internet policy, and has given several interviews to public radio about Russian politics in general.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Since my first book, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia, I’ve been fascinated by the way emerging political regimes, particularly during times of radical change, turn to language as a powerful tool, both communicative and symbolic, for establishing identity and authority. The closing chapters of my second book, After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics from Gorbachev to Putin, brought my study of language and authority in Russia squarely into the age of digitally networked communication systems.
In a curious stroke of coincidence, Vladimir Putin’s now decades-long presidency has paralleled the emergence and growth of the internet and social media as key alternative modes of public communication. As loathe as Putin has been to acknowledge these new media as legitimate (dismissing them as “50% pornography” and “a project of the CIA”), he and his more web-savvy advisors have assiduously sought not only to temper their potential impact as a political disrupter, but harness them for the regime’s own communicative needs.
And so, my big questions: In a political culture such as Russia’s, which has traditionally been adversely disposed to democratic discussion and public debate (those with authority don’t speak—they act), how and to what extent has digitally mediated communication changed the public landscape of political language and given rise to an alternative “networked public sphere” (Benkler 2006)? How, at various stages of the Putin era, have the Kremlin and its online apostles sought to contain the threat of web-based political and rhetorical threats, and exploit new media to articulate, legitimate, and advance their own views and agendas? To what extent have the political language and culture of Putin and Putinism themselves influenced the discursive landscape of the Russian-language internet?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Although the speech registers and styles of political language in digitally networked political communication are obviously as wide-ranging as those of more traditional media, I’ve been surprised to see the emergence of a persistent style of what might be called “mediated Putinese” [need a better term!]—a markedly masculine, aggressive, and often vulgar speech register that has its origins in both informal Russian speech culture, as well as the speaking style of Vladimir Putin himself. I’ve likewise been surprised by the degree to which not only more liberal-minded political voices have lived and died by the internet in Russia, but how some of the stauncher advocates of extremely conservative, “turbo-patriotic” views have relied on digital media and developed an outsized impact on public, political discourse in Russia. (See Yevgeny Prigozhin and Evgeny Lebedev.)
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
As with my previous work, this book should underscore for scholars the integral role that language and language culture play in shaping and legitimating political authority, and encourage the pursuit of linguistically sensitive analysis of political actors, events, and systems both in and beyond Russia. I also hope my work advances our understanding of the interrelationship between new media technologies and the legitimation of political power, particularly in authoritarian regimes. Finally, my examination of oppositional politician Alexey Navalny’s reliance on, and mastery of, social media to establish his position as a potent critic and alternative to Putinism, should provide a foundation for further investigation of his remarkable and tragic political career.
Yohei Igarashi is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on two fields: British romantic literature and computational literary studies, past and present. His work on British Romantic literature draws on media studies, the history of communication, and sociology, and includes The Connected Condition: British Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford University Press, 2020), an essay in Studies in Romanticism which won the Keats-Shelley Association of America essay prize, and other publications. In the field of computational literary studies, he has published collaborative articles and papers on topics ranging from poetic form to plain writing, as well as a recent magazine piece in Aeon on computer-generated writing. Igarashi is currently working on the history of the relationship between academic literary study in the US and computing, a part of which has been published in New Literary History. His wider interests include the histories of reading, writing, rhetoric, and literary criticism.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
I was initially interested, about ten years ago, when there were more intense discussions in literary studies about distant reading’s challenge to close reading, in the history of the relationship between those two practices. So I wrote an article, “Statistical Analysis at the Birth of Close Reading” (2015), and, as I worked on and finished a book on Romantic poetry and the problem of communication, I continued to think about the relationship between literary study and computing as broadly construed.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
There are little surprises all the time in doing research, and one of them has been how at different points from the late 19th century and through the 20th century, literary scholars called for empirical, quantitative, and supposedly more objective ways of studying literature—of analyzing literature scientifically. They’re each differently inflected by their different historical moments, but some of them are also surprisingly repetitive, similar to one another in rhetoric and rationale. And these proposals are largely ignored or rejected each time. So this, along with what this history might mean for today’s computational literary studies, are things I’m trying to account for.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
One of the questions my project takes up, and which I think would be an interesting avenue of inquiry in general, is what it means to treat artworks, textual or other, as data. It’s a complicated question that has to have many considerations—the philosophy of art, aesthetics, the specificities of the medium in question, theories of datafication, and more—and while I think I can make a contribution, providing one way of thinking about the datafication of verbal art, it’s a larger issue that I would like to see answered by others too.
Miriam Posner is assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Information Studies. She is also a digital humanities scholar with interests in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data. Her PhD, in film studies and American studies, is from Yale University. She has published widely on technology, data, and the humanities, including pieces in Logic, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. At the National Humanities Center, Miriam is at work on a book about the technology of global supply chains, under contract with Yale University Press.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Some years ago, brainstorming assignments for an undergrad course on digital labor, I thought of asking students to trace the supply chain of an electronic device. Luckily, I had the sense to attempt the assignment myself, and I quickly learned that it’s a nearly impossible task. Not only do companies keep their supply chains secret, but often, they don’t actually understand their own supply chains. That’s because these global networks are massively improvisational and fast-moving. If one node of the supply chain drops out, no one, except its nearest neighbors, is necessarily aware of a substitution. This insight—that companies can time the arrival of a product down to the hour but remain ignorant of the conditions of its production—was the spark that initiated this project.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
At one industry meeting, a supply-chain management veteran leaned into the mic: “The dirty secret of supply-chain management,” he intoned, “is that no one ever knows where the hell anything is.” I’ve been shocked at the extent to which this is true—not always, and not for everyone, but in general, it’s very hard to know where products or components are at any given point in time. No matter how seamless an online purchase experience, the product’s procurement is likely a cacophonous tangle of subcontractors, freight forwarders, drayage companies, and trucking brokers. There’s no eye in the sky coordinating it all—just countless person-to-person connections, everyone scrambling to get your shower curtain or printer cartridge to your door on the right day.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I’ve found it really eye-opening to know the ins and outs of the profession of supply-chain management. I had the idea that the industry is much more closely coordinated and centralized than the chaotic tangle it actually is. And supply-chain management, of course, is a huge part of global capitalism, so anyone who wants to understand what actually comprises the “global economy” will be interested in the logistical mechanics. I think people will be interested, too, in where power lies in the network of supply-chain relationships. I thought that the companies commissioning products would be calling the shots. In fact, though, companies called freight forwarders, which book spaces on cargo ships, hold a lot of the cards, since they’re the ones with data about which products are where.
Su-Ling Yeh holds the Fu Ssu-nien Memorial Chair at National Taiwan University and the distinguished position of lifetime professor in the Department of Psychology. With a rich background in interdisciplinary research, she also serves as the associate director at the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Robotics. Her extensive research interests encompass a wide range of fields in psychology, including consciousness, perception, attention, multisensory integration, aging, and applied psychological research. She has been honored with the Academic Award from the Ministry of Education and the Distinguished Research Award from the National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan. Her ongoing research is dedicated to investigating how psychology can contribute to enhancing human well-being in the era of AI, with a strong emphasis on aligning with human needs and emphasizing the uniqueness of human beings.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
The initial spark that ignited my interest in this project arose during my fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. As I delved into the origins and development of AI, along with the history of psychology, intriguing parallels emerged. These parallels prompted profound questions: What distinguishes human nature from AI? How can psychology, with its pursuit of well-being, fulfill human needs in this context? This project aims to unravel these questions by exploring the unique dimensions of human experience and leveraging psychological insights to enhance well-being in the age of AI. By integrating historical foundations, interdisciplinary collaborations, and an understanding of human beings, this research endeavors to shed light on aspects of humanity beyond replication by artificial systems. Ultimately, the goal is to navigate the complexities of the AI era and cultivate a future where human well-being remains paramount.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
During my research, I found the striking similarities between Turing’s exploration of machine thinking and behaviorism in psychology, as well as the convergence of explainable AI and the cognitive revolution, underscore the interconnectedness of these fields. Additionally, the impressive capabilities exhibited by ChatGPT and GPT4, such as zero-shot learning and a theory of mind, highlight the potential for AI systems to generalize, infer, and comprehend others’ thoughts. These revelations underscore the need for ongoing exploration and collaboration between AI and psychology, fostering intriguing inquiries into the convergence of cognitive science and the ethical implications of AI systems with human-like cognitive abilities. They act as catalysts for further investigation into the captivating possibilities that emerge at the intersection of AI and psychology.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
In the context of the aging population, this project explores the convergence of AI and psychology, uncovering new avenues of inquiry. Understanding the development trends and implications of AI, psychology provides insights into its capabilities, limitations, and potential for addressing the needs of older adults. This research investigates ethical considerations, AI-driven interventions for well-being, and the impact of AI on decision-making in eldercare. Fostering AI for well-being, the project facilitates collaborations and develops AI technologies aligned with the unique needs of older adults. Ultimately, it leverages AI advancements in psychology to enhance their well-being and advance psychological research and practice in an aging society.
The post Featured Research: Life in a Data-Driven, Technology-Mediated World appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>In this Scholar-to-Scholar conversation, historian Devin Fergus, feminist cultural critic Lynn Mie Itagaki, and anthropologist Matt Sakakeeny discuss efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy. They ask, how do scholars’ backgrounds and communities inform the research questions they pursue in the humanities?
Scholar-to-Scholar events are informal exchanges in a relevant and thematic discussion, rather than formal talks behind a lectern. This discussion was held in the National Humanities Center’s Teachers’ Commons before an audience of Fellows and staff.
Devin Fergus (NHC Fellow, 2023–24) is the Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies at the University of Missouri, where he teaches in the departments of History and Black Studies, the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, and the Trulaske College of Business.
Lynn Mie Itagaki (Resident Associate, 2023–24) is associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri and a nationally recognized expert on interracial civility and conflict. Her research and teaching interests include interracial ethics and twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature by writers of color.
Matt Sakakeeny (NHC Fellow, 2023–24) is associate professor of music at Tulane University and an anthropologist studying music and sound in relation to structures of inequality in the United States. His research also brings an ethnomusicological perspective to sound studies.
.entry-hero img {margin-top: -17%;}The post Scholar-to-Scholar Talk: “Positionality and Inequality in the Humanities” appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University
University of York
University of California, Los Angeles
Xiaolin Duan is associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. Duan studies medieval to early modern China, particularly environmental history and visual/material culture. She has published two books: The Rise of West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty (University of Washington Press, 2020) and An Object of Seduction: Chinese Silk in the Early Modern Trans-Pacific Trade (Lexington Books, 2022). She is currently working on a project considering the impact of trans-Pacific trade on urban infrastructure. She is also interested in place-product co-branding in Middle period China.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
The history of the early modern global network has come to the fore in recent years, yet the impact of the trans-Pacific connection between Asia and America remains largely uncharted. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Pacific silk trade forged a link between Ming China and colonial Mexico. I propose to investigate the influence of this trade on urban spaces and city life in key ports: Zhangzhou, Manila, and Acapulco. My argument posits that this unprecedented form of globalization generated intimate connections at the everyday life level while simultaneously giving rise to conflicts at the state and empire levels.
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
It’s fascinating to observe how different port cities responded to the burgeoning foreign trade in seemingly conflicting yet intriguing ways. Haicheng County in Zhangzhou and Acapulco in New Spain both grappled with the inherent instability of overseas trade by constructing numerous defense structures. Paradoxically, these very port cities also witnessed the emergence of innovative commercial markets tailored to foreign goods. What adds to this narrative is the intricate pattern of migration, particularly the experiences of Fujian locals who sojourned in Southeast Asia while maintaining a strong connection to their hometowns through requests to reconstruct their ancestral shrines. Furthermore, the dominance of Chinese barbers in the Mexican business is another captivating aspect that underscores the early modern migration.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I aim to enrich the scholarly discourse on early modern trade from a Pacific perspective. This research introduces the concept of “connected history” into the examination of urban development, shedding light on early modern globalization as a multifaceted phenomenon that encompasses diverse interpretations, intersecting with various urban experiences. My primary focus is the exploration of Ming dynasty foreign policy through an in-depth analysis of the local history of Zhangzhou and its interactions with the wider world. I anticipate that this study will make a valuable contribution to the fields of global history, urban history, and the history of everyday life.
Frederico Freitas is associate professor of Latin American and digital history at North Carolina State University, where he is a core member of the Visual Narrative Initiative. While at the National Humanities Center, he is working on his book-in-progress, Concrete Tropics: An Environmental History of Brazil’s Modernist Capital.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
As a planned city built according to modernist principles, Brasília is often cited as the ultimate example of the artificiality of mid-twentieth-century planned urban life. The city’s monumental architecture, car-centric grid system, and functional master plan have set the boundaries for most of the scholarship produced about Brazil’s new capital. A modernist city designed upon utopian ideals, Brasília was to provide a novel urban environment to foster the birth of a modern society. And yet, the city had to contend with the reality of the nature supporting its existence. My project shows how Brasília and the society it created are the products of not only the successes and failures of modernist planning but also the environmental processes that shaped the city’s construction and founding.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
One of the most surprising things about Brasília is how little it has been studied by historians of Brazil, particularly in the Anglophone academy. Architectural and urbanism scholars have thoroughly examined the city for its role as a site of experimentation of modernist architecture. Social scientists have also studied Brasília as the prime example of the problems of modernist utopian thinking in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, historians of Brazil have paid little attention to the city. In this way, the city has been used to illustrate global processes of adopting and implementing modernist ideas. Still, few attempts have been made to fit the construction of Brasília in the larger history of Brazilian mid-century territorial and industrial development.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
With this project, I plan to steer the debate on Brasília’s high modernism towards a story of how its builders and residents produced the city as a living space. I will focus on the tangled relationship between the built and natural environments in the city, its surrounding areas, and the broader Brazilian central savannah. Until the 1960s, the region where Brasília was established constituted a vast expanse of high-altitude tropical savannah known as Cerrado. Brasília was the first sizable urban center established in such an environment and, as the national capital, a bridgehead for the occupation of this hinterland. Today, the Cerrado is at the center of Brazilian agribusiness. The establishment of Brasília was crucial to transforming the Cerrado into a landscape of production.
Tom Johnson is a senior lecturer in late medieval history at the University of York. Before joining the History Department at York in 2016, Tom did his doctoral work at Birkbeck, University of London and held a research fellowship at the University of Cambridge. In 2018–19, he was a Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Tom’s research explores the lives of ordinary people during the Middle Ages, with a focus on how institutions shaped social relations. His first book, Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (2020) explores the way that legal ideas were used in everyday life in fifteenth-century England.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
I first came across the archive from Walberswick over a decade ago, drawn in by its closeness to home—it is kept in Ipswich, where I grew up and where my parents still live—and by the extraordinary array of material that had survived to document the everyday life of a medieval fishing village. I knew from the beginning that it would make a great “microhistory,” and much of the documentation, moreover, consisted of financial accounts, so it was a natural fit for questions I was beginning to consider, about how economic value was conceived of, and how this changed during the later Middle Ages. The fifteenth century has long been understood as a time of major economic transformation, and my hope is that a microhistory can illuminate what that meant for the people who lived through it.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Confronted with a body of financial evidence, my instinct was to insert it into a spreadsheet. I compiled a massive database from one book, recording the numbers of herring and sprats caught by the fishermen of Walberswick between 1450 and 1500, and employed a research assistant to help me process the data. So I know, now, that they caught over 10 million fish in those fifty years!
But more importantly, seeing the disparities between the accounts and the spreadsheet, and the lacunae the transcription created also made me realize the limits of quantification—or more specifically, that the churchwardens making these accounts thought about quantification in different ways to me: not only as a dry process of calculation, but also a social, and in some ways aesthetic process of meaning-making.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope the book will do a few things. First, that it will illuminate everyday economic life in the later Middle Ages. We know a lot about economic institutions—markets, high-level trade, money, and so on—but rather less about what day-to-day exchange looked like. Second, I want to bring to life how this worked in a rural coastal location in particular; fishing villages are generally under-represented in medieval social history, and I hope the book will help to remedy that. Third and most broadly, I hope that it will contribute to, and build on recent work in the history of medieval economic cultures; specifically, I want to draw more attention to the role of accounting, calculation, and numeracy as everyday practices that allowed ordinary people to make sense of their lives.
Stella Nair is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles and core faculty in the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program and the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program. She is also a Senior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University). Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas and is shaped by her interests in gender, spatial theory, construction technology, landscape transformations, and hemispheric networks. She has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes. Her current book project, Inca Architecture: Chapters in the History of a (Gendered) Profession, offers new perspectives on the Inca built environment by highlighting the profound ways in which women designed, constructed, used, and gave meaning to Inca spaces and places.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
I have spent over two decades working on Andean built environments, including that of the Inca. In recent years, it has become clear to me that Inca architectural studies is based on the assumption that Inca architecture was almost entirely a male enterprise. When most people think about Inca architecture, they think of male patrons, designers, builders, and users. But this goes against Andean traditions, where most activities are undertaken in gendered pairs. Hence, I am asking what roles did women have in the making of the Inca built environment? And, why have we denied the critical role these women played in making and using one of the most magnificent architectural traditions in the world?
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have been surprised by, not the absence, but the presence of ample evidence regarding the diverse roles that women played in shaping the Inca built environment. Even more surprising is that this evidence has not been explored before. I think this says a lot, not only about problems with how we have looked at Inca and other indigenous architectural traditions, but also about the assumption we make about the history of architecture in general. Women have played key roles throughout history in making the built environment, but their roles have often been marginalized when histories are written. I have been surprised to learn how often this has happened.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
My hope is that 1) we see Inca architecture in a far more nuanced and complex way, and 2) appreciate the critical and varied ways that women contributed to this incredible built environment. The Inca created one of the most sophisticated architectural traditions in the world, yet we have only begun to appreciate its diverse and dynamic history, as well as the key role females played in its making and meaning. I also hope that by highlighting the prominent and pervasive ways in which women shaped Inca places, that future scholars “see” Inca women in the archaeological record (i.e. not just when finding them doing what is currently assumed to be “women’s things” like cooking and weaving).
The post Featured Research: City, Town, Village appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>These community-focused events, organized and presented by local artists, scholars, and educators, highlight the incredible breadth of the humanities and demonstrate the innumerable ways that they add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us.
The creation of the American edition of the festival is the latest international expansion of the Being Human effort, which began in the United Kingdom in 2014. Previous “Being Human” festival events have taken place in France, Italy, Romania, and Singapore. In 2017, a sister festival was established in Melbourne, Australia and Princeton University served as a hub for events in the US in 2018 and 2019.
Tempe, AZ | Organizer: Arizona State University
Arizonans are in need of dialogue that brings them together to seek connection and understanding in the face of gun violence and debates surrounding gun laws and regulations. For this event, undergraduate students will collaborate with each other and a faculty teaching team as well as local citizen groups and community experts focused on gun-related issues. They will design and curate a series of short presentation/performance pieces such as TED-style talks, documentary films, musical and movement-based performances, and/or mixed-media projects. Enacting the principles of fourth response, the exhibits of the event will interweave humanities and arts-based research to incorporate lived experiences, critical engagement with controversial perspectives on guns and rights, and praxis toward a sustainable future free from rampant gun-related violence.
Red Hook, NY | Organizer: Bard College
This event will take place at the historic Montgomery Place site and will encourage an active exploration of regional and indigenous identity through history, art, education, agriculture, foodways, and placemaking. Indigenous artists from the area will lead hands-on workshops related to crafts and other traditions, while creating pop-up makerspaces where members of the public can watch and discuss their artistic practices.
Charlotte, NC | Organizer: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This event will bring together a tour of the Carolina Garden Trail stressing the legacy of African-descended crops and plants in North Carolina, a screening of the film “Living Histories of Sugar,” produced by Caribbean performance artists, a cooking lesson allowing attendees to make a sweet potato hand pie, and a lesson on plant propagation, taking a home a sweet potato or other seasonally appropriate seedling to plant and nurture. The event is designed to increase knowledge of North Carolina’s history through plants and foodways, encourage North Carolina citizens to feel a greater connection and involvement with the state’s civic identity through its crops and plants, offer a greater understanding of horticulture, and reach new audiences for humanities-based content through alternative learning environments.
Minneapolis, MN | Organizer: Felicia Cooper
This event will be based around the collection and curation of meaningful objects from members of the Minneapolis public, especially families. The objects will be labeled and displayed for visitors for three days on the Midtown Greenway. With permission from the object’s owners, they will then be incorporated into an original puppet show and object performance set to live music. This is an ironic take on what a museum typically is: instead of a stalwart pedestal, a brief and interactive ephemeral experience. This event will encourage reflection on the mass amount of consumerism tied into human life and capitalism in the United States through the playful and non-judgmental medium of puppetry. Audiences will encounter new modes of object-oriented histories while addressing our relationship to “things” in our built environment.
Riverside, CA | Organizer: University of California, Riverside
This event will present UCR STEM scholars who address their original and high-impact scientific research through the lens of the arts, crafting research and/or delivering results in creative and expressive formats. The event we propose will include both “show and tell” and “make and do” presentations and activities directed towards an intergenerational audience, including K–12 students as well as lifelong learners. By bringing STEM research into new formats and contexts, this event will demonstrate that the humanities can encourage critical thinking on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics by bringing their methods to all forms of intellectual inquiry.
St. Louis, MO | Organizer: Washington University in St. Louis
“The Power of Buttons” will involve two different pop-up workshops that will engage the St. Louis community with a small but powerful public text: the pin-back button. By focusing participant attention on the long history of the pin-back button, we intend to prompt more thinking about the texts so crucial to social movement and organization that often get overlooked by scholars in the academy. Though they’re common personal possessions and highly circulated tokens of political or social affiliation, it is difficult to categorize the pin-back button as strictly text or object; they both document and disseminate personal beliefs and preferences. Developed in partnership with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, this pop-up workshop will help participants consider the significance of buttons as a public text and persuasive tool throughout histories, social movements, civic engagement, humanistic inquiry, and community building. They will also design, create, and take home their own buttons.
Utica, NY | Organizer: Hamilton College
The first ever week-long zine fest for upstate NY will bring together the greater Utica community in Upstate New York to create zines through three workshops led by zine practitioners and cartoon artists. Taking their name from “fanzine,” an abbreviated name for a fan magazine that was popular in the 1930s, a zine is a small, self-made/published, cheap, and easy to read magazine meant to convey personal and political views of the day. In this digital age, zines continue to be the medium par excellence for self-expression and the mode for self-publishing across socio-economic backgrounds, identities, and communities. This public humanities zine fest will be an opportunity to bring together K–12 students and teachers, families, college students and faculty, the NY6 Humanities Corridor “Small Press Reading Series” group, local migrant communities, and the greater local public community to learn side-by-side about zines and how to make them.
Oklahoma City, OK | Organizer: University of Oklahoma
As the nation approaches the centennial of the founding of Route 66, a Route 66 Bus Tour and Writing Workshop will be held in Oklahoma, which will engage community members in the creative process of writing from a landscape-based perspective and in dialogue with Route 66 voices they may not have encountered before. As participants journey with us along Route 66, they will also journey to a writing product they will develop by acquiring place-based literacies—that is, by learning to read place and write about their experience. How do we celebrate the ’50s classic cars and photo-stop landmarks like the Blue Whale of Catoosa and the Round Barn of Arcadia? And how do we balance that celebration with an understanding of what the route meant to a diverse swath of mid-century Americans, including women and African Americans?
The National Humanities Center (NHC) is unique: a free standing national resource devoted to advancing significant humanistic study and reflection and to making those insights available both inside and outside the academic world. Founded in the 1970s, the NHC is a private, nonprofit and the only major independent institute for advanced study in the world dedicated to supporting excellence in humanities research and teaching.
Since its inception, over 1,500 Fellows have worked at the NHC, leading to nearly 1,800 books, and untold thousands of other scholarly works. Many of these books have been recognized with prestigious awards and helped shape thinking across academic disciplines. The Center also offers an extensive array of professional development and high quality educational resources for teachers that benefit millions of students in K–12 and college classrooms across the country. In addition, the National Humanities Center maintains a host of public engagement and advocacy efforts to highlight the significance of the humanities as the foundation of a democratic culture, a fulfilling life, and an informed citizenry.
The National Humanities Center is able to accomplish its work though the generosity and dedication of individual donors, foundations, and corporations as well as a distinguished group of institutional sponsors, all of whom share our commitment to excellence in the humanities. Will you help us continue the Center’s critical work? Please consider making a gift today.
Organizers for each of this year’s events have been awarded grants from the National Humanities Center to offset a portion of event costs. The grants were made possible through the generosity of our sponsors:
National Humanities Center Announces Sites for Inaugural “Being Human” Festival
“‘Being Human’ Fest to Include Oklahoma Event,” The Journal Record, November 20, 2023
Please use this space to connect with fellow “Being Human” event organizers before and after the Festival’s conclusion.
The post 2024 Being Human Festival — USA appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>These community-focused events, organized and presented by local artists, scholars, and educators, highlight the incredible breadth of the humanities and demonstrate the innumerable ways that they add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us.
The creation of the American edition of the festival is the latest international expansion of the Being Human effort, which began in the United Kingdom in 2014. Previous “Being Human” festival events have taken place in France, Italy, Romania, and Singapore. In 2017, a sister festival was established in Melbourne, Australia and Princeton University served as a hub for events in the US in 2018 and 2019.
Tempe, AZ | Organizer: Arizona State University
Arizonans are in need of dialogue that brings them together to seek connection and understanding in the face of gun violence and debates surrounding gun laws and regulations. For this event, undergraduate students will collaborate with each other and a faculty teaching team as well as local citizen groups and community experts focused on gun-related issues. They will design and curate a series of short presentation/performance pieces such as TED-style talks, documentary films, musical and movement-based performances, and/or mixed-media projects. Enacting the principles of fourth response, the exhibits of the event will interweave humanities and arts-based research to incorporate lived experiences, critical engagement with controversial perspectives on guns and rights, and praxis toward a sustainable future free from rampant gun-related violence.
Red Hook, NY | Organizer: Bard College
This event will take place at the historic Montgomery Place site and will encourage an active exploration of regional and indigenous identity through history, art, education, agriculture, foodways, and placemaking. Indigenous artists from the area will lead hands-on workshops related to crafts and other traditions, while creating pop-up makerspaces where members of the public can watch and discuss their artistic practices.
Charlotte, NC | Organizer: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This event will bring together a tour of the Carolina Garden Trail stressing the legacy of African-descended crops and plants in North Carolina, a screening of the film “Living Histories of Sugar,” produced by Caribbean performance artists, a cooking lesson allowing attendees to make a sweet potato hand pie, and a lesson on plant propagation, taking a home a sweet potato or other seasonally appropriate seedling to plant and nurture. The event is designed to increase knowledge of North Carolina’s history through plants and foodways, encourage North Carolina citizens to feel a greater connection and involvement with the state’s civic identity through its crops and plants, offer a greater understanding of horticulture, and reach new audiences for humanities-based content through alternative learning environments.
Minneapolis, MN | Organizer: Felicia Cooper
This event will be based around the collection and curation of meaningful objects from members of the Minneapolis public, especially families. The objects will be labeled and displayed for visitors for three days on the Midtown Greenway. With permission from the object’s owners, they will then be incorporated into an original puppet show and object performance set to live music. This is an ironic take on what a museum typically is: instead of a stalwart pedestal, a brief and interactive ephemeral experience. This event will encourage reflection on the mass amount of consumerism tied into human life and capitalism in the United States through the playful and non-judgmental medium of puppetry. Audiences will encounter new modes of object-oriented histories while addressing our relationship to “things” in our built environment.
Riverside, CA | Organizer: University of California, Riverside
This event will present UCR STEM scholars who address their original and high-impact scientific research through the lens of the arts, crafting research and/or delivering results in creative and expressive formats. The event we propose will include both “show and tell” and “make and do” presentations and activities directed towards an intergenerational audience, including K–12 students as well as lifelong learners. By bringing STEM research into new formats and contexts, this event will demonstrate that the humanities can encourage critical thinking on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics by bringing their methods to all forms of intellectual inquiry.
St. Louis, MO | Organizer: Washington University in St. Louis
“The Power of Buttons” will involve two different pop-up workshops that will engage the St. Louis community with a small but powerful public text: the pin-back button. By focusing participant attention on the long history of the pin-back button, we intend to prompt more thinking about the texts so crucial to social movement and organization that often get overlooked by scholars in the academy. Though they’re common personal possessions and highly circulated tokens of political or social affiliation, it is difficult to categorize the pin-back button as strictly text or object; they both document and disseminate personal beliefs and preferences. Developed in partnership with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, this pop-up workshop will help participants consider the significance of buttons as a public text and persuasive tool throughout histories, social movements, civic engagement, humanistic inquiry, and community building. They will also design, create, and take home their own buttons.
Utica, NY | Organizer: Hamilton College
The first ever week-long zine fest for upstate NY will bring together the greater Utica community in Upstate New York to create zines through three workshops led by zine practitioners and cartoon artists. Taking their name from “fanzine,” an abbreviated name for a fan magazine that was popular in the 1930s, a zine is a small, self-made/published, cheap, and easy to read magazine meant to convey personal and political views of the day. In this digital age, zines continue to be the medium par excellence for self-expression and the mode for self-publishing across socio-economic backgrounds, identities, and communities. This public humanities zine fest will be an opportunity to bring together K–12 students and teachers, families, college students and faculty, the NY6 Humanities Corridor “Small Press Reading Series” group, local migrant communities, and the greater local public community to learn side-by-side about zines and how to make them.
Oklahoma City, OK | Organizer: University of Oklahoma
As the nation approaches the centennial of the founding of Route 66, a Route 66 Bus Tour and Writing Workshop will be held in Oklahoma, which will engage community members in the creative process of writing from a landscape-based perspective and in dialogue with Route 66 voices they may not have encountered before. As participants journey with us along Route 66, they will also journey to a writing product they will develop by acquiring place-based literacies—that is, by learning to read place and write about their experience. How do we celebrate the ’50s classic cars and photo-stop landmarks like the Blue Whale of Catoosa and the Round Barn of Arcadia? And how do we balance that celebration with an understanding of what the route meant to a diverse swath of mid-century Americans, including women and African Americans?
The National Humanities Center (NHC) is unique: a free standing national resource devoted to advancing significant humanistic study and reflection and to making those insights available both inside and outside the academic world. Founded in the 1970s, the NHC is a private, nonprofit and the only major independent institute for advanced study in the world dedicated to supporting excellence in humanities research and teaching.
Since its inception, over 1,500 Fellows have worked at the NHC, leading to nearly 1,800 books, and untold thousands of other scholarly works. Many of these books have been recognized with prestigious awards and helped shape thinking across academic disciplines. The Center also offers an extensive array of professional development and high quality educational resources for teachers that benefit millions of students in K–12 and college classrooms across the country. In addition, the National Humanities Center maintains a host of public engagement and advocacy efforts to highlight the significance of the humanities as the foundation of a democratic culture, a fulfilling life, and an informed citizenry.
The National Humanities Center is able to accomplish its work though the generosity and dedication of individual donors, foundations, and corporations as well as a distinguished group of institutional sponsors, all of whom share our commitment to excellence in the humanities. Will you help us continue the Center’s critical work? Please consider making a gift today.
Organizers for each of this year’s events have been awarded grants from the National Humanities Center to offset a portion of event costs. The grants were made possible through the generosity of our sponsors:
National Humanities Center Announces Sites for Inaugural “Being Human” Festival
“‘Being Human’ Fest to Include Oklahoma Event,” The Journal Record, November 20, 2023
Please use this space to connect with fellow “Being Human” event organizers before and after the Festival’s conclusion.
The post 2024 Being Human Festival USA appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>Spelman College
Duke University
Concordia University
Johns Hopkins University
Sequoia Maner is assistant professor of English at Spelman College where she teaches classes related to African American literature and culture. She serves as secretary on the Board of Directors of TORCH Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization for Black women writers, and is a mentor with PEN America’s Incarcerated Writers Bureau (IWB). She is a poetry fellow of The Watering Hole and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Maner is author of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (33 1/3 series, Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022) and the prize-winning chapbook Little Girl Blue: Poems (Host Publications, 2021). She is coauthor of the book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020). Her poems, essays, and reviews can be found in venues such as Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, The Feminist Wire, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Rather than a spark, this book has unfurled like a slow-smoldering fire. As a reader and writer of poetry living during a time shaped by death and loss, I found myself engaged by the project of the elegy, by the work of mourning and memorializing. I’ve been thinking through the many textures of the elegiac mode for some time now, and in doing so, have turned to masters of the African American poetic tradition as lodestars: Wheatley-Peters, Hughes, Brooks, Cortez, Clifton, and so many others. Black poets know a thing or two about writing in the wake of death, especially those deaths that are public, tragic, unnatural, and thought to be unspeakable.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I am inspired by the boundless ways poets have transmitted simple messages like: “I loved you, even if I didn’t know you;” “I will continue to think of you;” “You didn’t deserve a death like this;” “You are gone too soon;” “I was not ready to mourn your loss;” “I speak your name.” And while it is not surprising that Black poets illuminate absolutely elemental aspects of human emotion, I remain astounded by the range of innovation regarding expressions of grief in the wake of death.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I think my approach to elegy opens up interesting conversations about historicization and timeliness. For example, consider how in elegizing Frederick Douglass, poets such as Cordelia Ray, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Hayden, and Evie Shockley, among many others, emerge as a cadre of living and historical poets who animate, pay homage to, complicate, and contextualize the great abolitionist. This model of achronological clustering that moves fluidly across centuries allows for expansive thinking and reframing of literary genealogies which are too often, temporally bounded.
Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written on a range of topics, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), and Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002, and 2021). An authority on African American art and culture, he has also organized numerous art exhibitions, most notably The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989); Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997); To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005); and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014).
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Seeing the 2015 Museum of Modern Art exhibition One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North prompted me to reconsider Lawrence’s work in the context of color, and this led to considering the chromatic dynamics operative in other artists’ paintings.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I was surprised by the problematic position the color brown has in color theory, and the attendant debates surrounding its study. Although brown is not present in the conventional color wheel, many color theorist nevertheless consider it an elemental color, along with red, blue, green, etc.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
Further art historical research on the interconnections between a work of art’s formal aspects and its cultural context.
Jonathan Sachs is professor of English at Concordia University in Montréal. His work focuses on British literature from 1750 to 1850, exploring the role of literature in constructing historical and temporal experience, including the uses of antiquity, the anticipation of the future, and practices of reading. Sachs is the author of The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832 (Oxford University Press, 2010), and the coauthor, with The Multigraph Collective, of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has recently finished, with Andrew Stauffer, a new one-volume edition, Lord Byron: Selected Writings for the Oxford University Press series 21st-Century Oxford Authors. Sachs has served as the Principal Investigator of the Interacting with Print Research Group (2014–2020), as the Romanticism Section editor of Blackwell’s Literature Compass (2015–2020) and as a member of the MLA’s Executive Committee for Later Eighteenth-Century Literature (2015–2020).
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
From the “Slow Movement” to Jenny Odell, so much recent thinking encourages us to slow down and step back from the speed of digital media and contemporary life. Reading this work I was struck by how much this polemical emphasis on slowness resonated with the Romantic poetry that I study. How do we understand the value placed on slow time in this work: is it merely reactive to the acceleration of contemporary life or does it reveal an undercurrent of potentially slower experiences that are also fundamental to the modern sense of time? And how might thinking about the proliferation of print at an earlier historical moment help us to think more broadly about how societies adjust to the speed of new media?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Every new project produces surprises! One that jumps out about this project is how badly I had previously gotten Wordsworth’s poetry wrong. I had read Wordsworth as an apostate conservative whose poetry was often banal. But, guided by the work of Geoffrey Hartman, David Simpson and others, I have now come to see that so little happens in so much of Wordsworth’s poetry by design. He is trying to teach us how to pay attention differently. Thinking about Wordsworth as a poet of bewilderment in the face of novelty and change—and his poetry as a vehicle for articulating what it means not to know or understand something—opened up for me the importance of his work.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
My project argues that one of Romanticism’s overlooked but defining features is a sense of uneven time that responds to a sense of slowness overlapping with the acceleration of contemporary life. In this way, I hope that this book contributes to the renewed attention to time and what some are calling the “temporal turn” in Romantic studies. More broadly, I want to suggest that attending to the representation of acceleration and slowness in Romantic poetry has much to teach us as we try to understand the hurry of our modern life and as we think about the risks and opportunities for contemporary life brought by emergent technologies, big data, and new media.
Elanor Taylor is associate professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). She received her PhD in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012, and was an assistant professor of philosophy at Iowa State University before moving to JHU in 2017. Taylor works mostly in metaphysics, particularly metaphysics of science and social metaphysics, and is especially interested in questions about connections between explanation and metaphysics. While in residence at the National Humanities Center, Taylor will be working on a book project titled The Foundations of Social Metaphysics. This project concerns the nature and possibility of social metaphysics, and connects these issues to broader philosophical questions about what it is to be a realist, and about connections between realism and inquiry.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Metaphysics is the study of the nature and structure of reality. Social metaphysics applies the tools of metaphysics to social entities such as classes, institutions, genders, and ethnicities. Recently some have argued that traditional metaphysical frameworks are not appropriate for social metaphysics, given that they were not developed for social subject-matter. While reflecting on these issues I realized that the apparent challenges for social metaphysics instantiate a common pattern that appears across many different areas of philosophy, in attempts to connect realism, mind-independence, and the legitimacy of inquiry. Accordingly this project engages with big-picture questions about what it is for something to be real, what it is to be a realist, and how realism is connected to the legitimacy or otherwise of inquiry.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have found myself surprised by the amount of research in the humanities relevant to core issues in general analytic metaphysics, such as questions about existence, reality, and different ways in which things can depend on other things, that is not typically taken up in that literature. This includes research from history of science on the nature of objectivity, from anthropology on the development of the notion of reality, and from feminist theory on social structure. Most analytic metaphysicians acknowledge that their work must be responsive to and informed by the natural sciences—I recommend extending this commitment to include the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I have three main goals for this project. The first is to articulate and defend a metaphysical framework that accommodates social metaphysics and resolves some long-standing issues for other areas of metaphysics. In doing so I hope to offer solid foundations for social metaphysics and to vindicate its standing as metaphysics. The second is to offer diagnostic tools that illustrate connections between a range of different problems across different areas of philosophy. The third is to model a more expansive conception of the bodies of work to which analytic metaphysics should be responsive and relevant, moving away from merely basic research in the natural sciences and towards encompassing research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The post Featured Research: Affect, Perception, and Reality appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
The University of Texas at Dallas
University of Missouri
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Justin T. Clark is a social and cultural historian of the United States in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and The Zero Season (Penguin Random House, 2022). He has received fellowships from the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Winterthur Library, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Singapore Ministry of Education, and the Australian National University Humanities Research Centre, among others.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
After writing City of Second Sight, I became interested in temporality. I felt that while time consciousness had received significant attention from historians, temporal justice had not. I began to become interested in the connection between temporal justice in “everyday” life and in history; that is, how our understanding of promises in the mundane sense of contracts relates to the promises inherent in American exceptionalism.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
In writing an article related to my current book project, I was surprised to discover that 18th-century New England jails were far more dedicated to punishment than historians have generally supposed, in the sense that they tended to hold prisoners at the behest of their putative victims, rather than simply detaining them for trial and other forms of punishment. I’ve also found that debt imprisonment was a much more central part of the development of carceral punishment than historians have generally supposed.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope it will help us recognize the importance of temporal culture to American history, and in particular, that the problem of time extends well beyond timekeepers, and structures our law and politics. I hope it can also help us understand our present political moment better, by examining how ideas about debts to both past generations and to posterity developed in American consciousness.
Katherine Davies is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Dallas, specializing in continental philosophy, feminist and queer theory, and the history of philosophy. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph Heidegger’s Conversations: Toward a Poetic Pedagogy (State University of New York Press). Her articles have appeared in Research in Phenomenology, Arendt Studies, and Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, among other scholarly venues. Her current research draws upon the recent critical turn in phenomenology as well as feminist and queer studies to interrogate the US foster care system from a philosophical perspective.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Humanities scholars have been studying the foster care system for decades. Yet despite recent advances in ethical and sociopolitical analysis such as mass incarceration studies, critical prison studies, intersectional feminisms, trauma studies, and queer kinship theory, no philosopher has yet brought these resources to a sustained examination of the foster care system. As I have been working, I’ve wondered whether foster care is a welfare system or an arm of mass incarceration, directed primarily against women and children of color. I’ve also considered whether liberal conceptions of subjectivity are sufficient to account for the harms survivors of the system experience or whether feminist relational accounts of the self better illuminate these. Finally, I’ve wondered how survival informs possibilities of queering notions of family and community.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Dorothy Roberts’ work on foster care—which she convincingly shows is better termed the “family policing system”—upended my initial sense of the functionality of foster care. The fact that Black children are removed at four times the rate of white children is both surprising and cannot be ignored. I was reading her book while the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the southern border was in full effect. The primary tool of this policy is foster care, which has lost hundreds of separated children. When I began working on this topic, I believed I would harness feminist care ethics to argue for trauma-informed practices of caring for vulnerable children. Increasingly, I have come to realize how histories of state violence have shaped foster care.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
In the extant scholarship on the topic, historical or literary illustration of foster care is often punctuated by quantitative, statistical research or by individual anecdotes of those impacted by the foster care system in some way. A feminist, critical phenomenological philosophical analysis will go beyond these approaches by describing the inherent relationality of the subject with her world as well as the shared features of lived experience that the foster care system molds and shapes. The project aims to both diagnose foster care’s failures in re-traumatizing vulnerable families and communities while also elucidating the particular form of consciousness that results from surviving the system, especially the insight such lived experience can offer for imagining more equitable and just futures.
Devin Fergus is the Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies at the University of Missouri where he teaches in the departments of History and Black Studies, the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, and the Trulaske College of Business. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Slate, among other outlets. He is the author of Land of the Fee (Oxford University Press, 2018), which The Nation designated one of the five most important books by a scholar for understanding capitalism. His first book, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics (University of Georgia Press, 2009), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. At the National Humanities Center, Professor Fergus will complete an in-depth exploration of Clinton’s One America (1997–98): A Presidential Initiative on Race (PIR), which was the last major federal initiative to address racial reconciliation and racial equity.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
The origin story of this project dates to the last national effort to systematically grapple with race in America—Clinton’s Presidential Initiative on Race (PIR). With the post-Cold War as backdrop, the initiative was intended to provide the nation with a racial roadmap for the 21st century in order “to become the world’s first truly multiracial, multiethnic democracy.” Yet, as we approach the quarter century mark since the PIR’s 1998 report, the US has seemingly veered far off the path hoped for and envisioned by Initiative architects. What might the making and unmaking of One America tell us about race and American democracy in the 21st century?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I am fortunate to be coauthoring this project with Dr. Nishani Frazier, associate professor of American studies and history at the University of Kansas. Dr. Frazier is a consummate researcher and scholar. In the personal papers of Dr. John Hope Franklin, Dr. Frazier located a letter that I wrote when I was a graduate student and shortly after Dr. Franklin finished his term as PIR chair. The letter shows the profound influence that he had on my approach to history then and now. I was genuinely surprised by Dr. Frazier unearthing my letter. It was a time capsule into my much earlier thinking as a fledgling professional historian that Dr. Franklin’s work on the PIR was crucially important to race relations in America.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
The events of this summer, most notably the Supreme Court’s opinions considering race in higher education admissions, has returned us to a familiar inquiry: whether race and diversity remain compelling state interests. The color-blind agenda of the court today echoes the political environment that drowned out the most important of PIR’s findings. For all its flaws and shortcomings, PIR interpreted race and diversity as not simply part of the nation’s past but necessarily constitutive to America’s future—that is, a public good that would advance the national interest now and into the 21st century, within and beyond the US borders.
Lisa A. Lindsay is professor and recent former chair of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in the history of Nigeria, the slave trade, and the Atlantic world, she is the author of Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth Century Odyssey from America to Africa, which won the African Studies Association’s prize for the best book in any field of African studies published in 2017, as well as additional books and coedited volumes on African and diaspora social history. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and her outstanding teaching has been recognized with a UNC distinguished term professorship.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
How did the Atlantic slave trade transform the lives of West African women? I was already interested in this question when I encountered the captain’s log of the slave ship Unity, which sailed from Ouidah (in modern Benin) to Jamaica in 1770. The ship contained a large number of enslaved women, who repeatedly resisted their captivity. My goal is to narrate and contextualize this voyage to help illuminate how overseas slaving transformed relations between men and women in African societies, how African women became enslaved, what they experienced as captives, and how they resisted. To probe these topics is to better understand gender and human trafficking in the Atlantic world and perhaps to inspire solutions to what seem like intractable problems today.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Several elements of the voyage of the Unity are surprising. Compared to other slave ships, it included a large proportion of female captives. Its prisoners rose in revolt, not once, not just in sight of land, but on multiple occasions. The resistance seems correlated with deaths from smallpox, which was understood in Dahomey as a weapon of Sakpata, the deity of smallpox and political opposition. Finally, at the same time that the Unity sailed, other ships from the Bight of Benin carried large numbers of enslaved women, who also rebelled. The cluster of disproportionately female, disproportionately defiant slave ships from this time and place points to specific forces leading to the enslavement of women, their familiarity with violence, and their determination to fight.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
Scholars have described African responses to European demand for enslaved labor and the experiences of enslaved women in the Americas, but we have much to learn about the slave trade’s profoundly gendered effects on African societies. How did Atlantic slaving affect women in Africa? How were women enslaved? How did female captives confront and endure the Middle Passage? How did women shape insurrections? By investigating enslaved African women’s experiences and actions, we can more fully envision resistance to slavery, beginning in West Africa and flowing across the Atlantic. In our own time, Unity serves as a reminder of women’s centrality to world-shaping processes, their resilience, and their power to challenge seemingly insurmountable forces in pursuit of a more secure future.
The post Featured Research: Addressing Legacies of Injustice and the Effects of Bondage appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>The National Humanities Center (NHC) is pleased to welcome thirty-two undergraduates who have been selected for the Center’s National Humanities Leadership Council. Nominated by faculty from colleges and universities across the country, these students will receive professional development and mentoring from leading scholars and other humanities professionals as well as research support, opportunities for networking, and access to NHC programming and expertise.
Council members will participate in a series of interactive sessions with leaders from across the country exploring the importance of the humanities in addressing contemporary challenges.
By bringing together a diverse group of students with shared intellectual passions and similar professional goals, the council aims to facilitate creative and ambitious inter-institutional collaborations that help students prepare for a wide range of careers. Council members represent a range of institutions in thirteen states—Arizona, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
“The exceptional students selected for the council this year are pursuing an assortment of majors, from art history to biochemistry to Middle Eastern studies,” said NHC Director of Public Engagement Jacqueline Kellish, “but they all share a deep interest and passion for the humanities.”
“Over half of this year’s cohort are pursuing multiple majors,” Kellish notes, “looking to broaden or enrich what they are learning about neuroscience or urban studies with perspectives gained from studying philosophy, languages, cultures, and history. We are looking forward to working with these brilliant young people in the coming months and exploring with them the ways that their humanities knowledge and training can help them forge successful careers and make a difference in their communities and beyond.”
The 2023–24 council members are:
Don Solomon
Director of Communications
919.406.0120
The post National Humanities Center Names Students for 2023–24 Leadership Council appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>A zine fest in upstate New York. A pop-up museum with puppets in Minneapolis. A writer’s workshop on wheels in Oklahoma. These are just a few of the events to be featured next April as part of the National Humanities Center’s first annual “Being Human” festival.
Inspired by and undertaken in partnership with the United Kingdom’s Being Human festival, which originated in 2014, the inaugural US version will include events in nine locations across the country. Each of these events will be community-focused and highlight the ways that the humanities add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us.
The creation of the US-spanning version of the festival is the latest international expansion of this effort. Previous “Being Human” festival events have taken place in France, Italy, Romania, and Singapore. In 2017, a sister festival was established in Melbourne, Australia and Princeton University served as a hub for events in the US in 2018 and 2019.
Events in this year’s “Being Human” Festival (US) were selected from a wide variety of proposals submitted to the National Humanities Center. Organizers of those events will receive grants from the Center, paid for with funds generously provided by Thruston and Patricia R. Morton (NHC trustee emerita) and current NHC trustees Porter Durham and Rishi Jaitly.
“We are excited to be working with partners across the US to stage what we hope will be an annual celebration of the humanities,” said Robert D. Newman, president and director of the National Humanities Center. “The variety of events, approaches, and topics submitted for this year’s festival showcase the innumerable ways the humanities inform and bring joy to our lives, and we hope to build on the success of April’s festival in the years ahead.”
Community | Presenter | Event |
---|---|---|
Mesa, AZ | Humanities Lab, Arizona State University | Guns, Art-Making, and Truth: Public Dialogues on Gun Violence |
Looking to cope with the trauma of gun violence, students, teachers, citizen groups, and community experts will come together to create and curate short presentations/performances (TED-style talks, documentary films, musical and movement-based performances, and/or mixed-media projects). | ||
Riverside, CA | University of California, Riverside, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Gluck Fellows Program | The Artistic Expression of Original Research |
With presentations and hands-on experiences, this event will feature STEM scholars who enhance the reception and understanding of their scientific research by crafting research or delivering results in creative and expressive formats. | ||
Minneapolis, MN | Felicia Cooper, Minneapolis Center for Performing Arts | The Archive of Significant Objects |
Using items collected from members of the community, this pop-up museum will examine our relationship to things by first displaying the assembled items for contemplation, then incorporating them into an original puppet show and object performance set to live music. | ||
St. Louis, MO | Washington University in St. Louis and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis | The Power of Buttons |
As participants design and create their own buttons in this community workshop, they will also explore the history and significance of pin-back buttons as tools of personal expression and political persuasion that have been used to stimulate change and express sentiments from the whimsical to the profound. | ||
Red Hook, NY | Bard College | Indigenous Arts Festival |
Held at Montgomery Place, a national historical landmark, this event will encourage active exploration of regional and indigenous identity through history, art, education, agriculture, foodways, and placemaking. | ||
Charlotte, NC | University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Charlotte Botanical Gardens | Living Histories, Living Plants: Film, Food, and Fellowship on the Carolina Garden Trail |
Through a variety of activities at the Carolina Garden Trail, attendees will learn about the legacy of African-descended crops and plants in North Carolina and more fully appreciate the history, horticulture, and food that define the Carolinas. | ||
Durham, NC | National Humanities Center | Regional Rhythms: Music and Cultural Memory in the American South |
Literary scholar and musician Florence Dore (NHC Fellow, 2008–09; 2016–17) will share music from the blues, rock, and folk traditions of the American South while contextualizing the music’s connection to racial histories and struggles of the twentieth century. | ||
Oklahoma City, OK | The University of Oklahoma | Writing the Route: Route 66 Bus Tour and Writing Workshop |
Participants will learn about place-based writing as they travel past historic landmarks along Route 66 like the Blue Whale of Catoosa and the Round Barn of Acadia and gain a deeper understanding of what the famed route has meant to a wide swath of Americans since the mid-twentieth century. | ||
Utica, NY | Hamilton College | Zine Fest 2024 |
The first ever week-long zine fest for upstate NY will include workshops for students and teachers, families and other members of the community working side-by-side with zine practitioners/cartoon artists to learn about zines and how to make them. |
Don Solomon
Director of Communications
919.406.0120
The post National Humanities Center Announces Sites for Inaugural “Being Human” Festival appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>Bleichmar is a professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California (USC) where she is also the founding director of the Levan Institute for the Humanities and director of the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Previously she served as associate provost for Faculty and Student Initiatives in the Arts and Humanities (2015–20).
Bleichmar grew up in Argentina and Mexico before immigrating to the US, and her scholarship explores the histories of art and science in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe. She has written extensively on these topics, including in her award-winning books, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2012) and Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (2017) and four coedited collections. Visible Empire is a study of five scientific expeditions funded by the Spanish crown to explore the natural history of the Spanish Americas and the Philippines. Visual Voyages examines the intertwined histories of art and science, the Americas and Europe from 1492 to 1859 and was accompanied by a major international exhibition at the Huntington Library. Bleichmar has received multiple prizes and fellowships for her work and, in 2007, was honored by Smithsonian Magazine as one of “37 under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences.”
“We are delighted to have Daniela join the Center’s board,” said NHC President and Director Robert D. Newman. “Her experience as a humanities innovator and leader, the expansiveness of her scholarly expertise and vision, and her tremendous energy are welcome additions. Our trustees and staff are excited that she has agreed to join us in helping guide the National Humanities Center’s future.”
Don Solomon
Director of Communications
919.406.0120
The post National Humanities Center Board Welcomes New Member appeared first on National Humanities Center.
]]>The post Individual Rights vs. Social Responsibilities in a Pandemic appeared first on Humanities in Action.
]]>The post Healing Rifts and Restoring Civility appeared first on Humanities in Action.
]]>The post Addressing Structural Racism in the Academy appeared first on Humanities in Action.
]]>The post Pursuing Justice and Preserving Open Debate appeared first on Humanities in Action.
]]>The post Calling on the Humanities in the Midst of a Pandemic appeared first on Humanities in Action.
]]>