Welcome
From the Quadrangle
LECTURE SERIES TAKES WORLD CINEMA BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
Before we can really say what “World Cinema” is, we have to think about a more fundamental question,” explained Marta Figlerowicz. “What do you think a world is?”
PERCIVAL EVERETT DELIVERS FINZI-CONTINI LECTURE
Waiting for Percival Everett’s Finzi-Contini Lecture last week, folks in the lecture hall seemed more eager than usual to speak to one another, talking to strangers—sometimes over rows of seats—about stories.
“Are you a fan?” asked a man to the woman behind him.
“Yes!” she answered, her enthusiasm audible. “How many have you read?”
Read more SHEILA HETI ON PROCESS
Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Pure Colour, joined the Whitney Humanities Center for a semester as our Fall 2022 Franke Visiting Fellow.
Read more ELIZABETH ALEXANDER ON ART AND DELAYED COMPREHENSION
At first Elizabeth Alexander ’84 didn’t see the small, brown-skinned servant in the portrait of Elihu Yale that hung in the Corporation Room at Yale, where she attended meetings as a professor and department chair.
Read more LEARNING TO LOVE OUR MULTISPECIES ROOMMATES
For Emanuele Coccia, ecology starts at home. At home—a “temple of love,” as Coccia put it—we share an order with people and beings we love. We must learn to “imagine the world as a huge house, where everything is in order—like your apartments,” Coccia said.
Read more ANNIE ERNAUX AWARDED NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
This semester, I’m teaching an undergraduate seminar at Yale entitled “Fictions of Consumer Society.” After Émile Zola’s landmark novel on department stores, Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Delight, 1883), we were preparing to study Annie Ernaux’s stunning first novel, Les Armoires vides—literally, The Empty Wardrobes.
Read more FILMMAKING FOR PRISON ABOLITION
Filmmaker and Yale Ph.D. candidate Sylvia Ryerson (American Studies) collaborates with artists, organizers, and scholars on all sides of prison walls to imagine a future beyond those walls. Her work—whether in the form of scholarship or film—probes the overlapping crises of mass incarceration, rural poverty, and environmental destruction.
Read more FROM PANEL TO PUBLICATION
Co-editor of Ferrante Unframed (2021) Costanza Barchiesi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Italian Studies. Her research explores classical reverberations in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian novels, women’s writing, and feminism. She is also pursuing a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Read more THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL EDGES OF LIFE
If a person dies of dehydration, that’s it. They are gone. We would never think that pouring any amount of water onto a human corpse would somehow cause it to spring back to life. But that is not the case for all living things, as Carl Zimmer told a captivated Zoom audience on March 30 during his talk, “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.”
Read more MAURICE PIALAT, FILM PRINTS, AND WATCHING FILMS TOGETHER
Films at the Whitney hosted a double bill of Maurice Pialat’s feature début, L’enfance nue (1968, Naked Childhood), and his prize-winning short L’amour existe (1960, Love Exists) on April 2, 2022. The event marked the second in-person screening sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center in Spring 2022, and the first since 2019 that welcomed the New Haven community.
Read more WHY WE NEED MEDEA NOW MORE THAN EVER
Feet planted in the middle of the road, a young Black woman in a sundress stands alone against a phalanx of police in Baton Rouge. This moment, captured by photographer Jonathan Bachman in July 2016 freezes a singular moment of confrontation during the nationwide protests following the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
Read more THE WHITNEY LAUNCHES NEW GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
When the United States saw a spike in hunting license sales at the start of the pandemic, Camila Marcone paid close attention.
Read more THE WHITNEY WELCOMES DH@YALE
What new ways of thinking emerge when we turn novels into bags of words—when we count rather than close-read elements of a text? What kinds of knowledge can we produce when we convert pictures into pixels and make robots read covers of Vogue?
Read more WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE YOUR RACE?
The Whitney Humanities Center opened the academic year with the Finzi-Contini Lecture, delivered by Namwali Serpell, Professor of English at Harvard, Yale alumna, and author of several books, including her novel The Old Drift, which won the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.
Read more MAKING SPACE FOR THE HUMANITIES
Founded in 1981, the Whitney Humanities Center has long been represented by a single image that graced the second-floor lecture room at 53 Wall Street: a carving of a ship above the mantle. But that ship sailed when the Whitney moved out of 53 Wall Street and into HQ at 320 York Street, from the outskirts of campus to the center of humanities conversations and initiatives.
Read more DAVID DIOP’S “AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK” WINS INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
It’s hard to miss, but I passed it twice before realizing what I was looking at. Just in front of the gare centrale in the Plateau region of Dakar, in the middle of a rond-point, is a bronze statue of two men atop a white pillar.
Read more “MAKE IT SING!” JON BUTLER REMEMBERS 320 YORK
Here at the Whitney Humanities Center, we are very excited to be part of the new Humanities Quadrangle. But, although recently reimagined and renovated to function as a humanities hub, 320 York Street has a long history of housing humanities departments.
Read more THE STONE HEADS OF 320 YORK
As you enter the new Humanities building at 320 York Street—the Humanities Quadrangle, or HQ—you might notice twelve stone heads looking down at you from the arched entrance. Although the heads’ exaggerated ears suggest a certain looseness with anatomical detail, the specificity of the faces suggests they represent real people.
Read more FROM THE QUADRANGLE
I’m delighted to launch a new space on our website that we’ve named From the Quadrangle. We will be featuring interviews, unknown facts and stories about our history, and glimpses of future ventures. This space is not only about the Whitney Humanities Center—it’s about the larger comings and goings of the humanities at Yale writ large.
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