Following Yale COVID-19 guidelines, the Whitney Humanities Center is closed for events until further notice. We are hosting virtual talks and other events throughout the semester; we hope you will join us.
With thanks and good wishes,
The staff of the Whitney Humanities Center
Distinguished Speaker Series
Ainissa Ramirez, American materials scientist and science communicator
Ramirez speaks widely on the topics of science and technology and gave a TED talk on the importance of science education. She has been awarded prizes from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the American Institute of Physics. She speaks internationally on the importance of making science fun and has served as a science advisor to the American Film Institute, WGBH/NOVA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and several science museums. She also hosts a science podcast called Science Underground.
Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities
Registration link
4:00 pm, Zoom EST
When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that many facial recognition technologies misclassify women and darker-skinned faces, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms.
Immediately following the screening, Professor Elisa Celis will moderate a discussion with the filmmaker, Shalini Kantayya.
Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities
Registration link
4:00 pm, Zoom EST
Understanding the Nature of Inference: Correlation and Causation Colloquium Series
Thursday, April 22 • 3 pm
Lorenzo Magnani, University of Pavia, Italy
Friday, April 23 • 3 pm
Moderated conversation with James Weatherall, University of California, Irvine
Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities and The John Templeton Foundation
Registration link
Poster
Michael Sells on his new translation of the 12th–13th century mystic and poet Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi.
A reading and conversation with Feisal G. Mohamed
“Michael Sells has produced a book of glories, poems like dry stones in reflecting water. This collection is both a visual experience for one who can’t read Arabic and a deep literary thrill for one who can open to these translations. The threads of Quranic sound are spread in patches on the pages. Here we see fulfilled a poetics of bewilderment. Without desire, where would the future be?”
—Fanny Howe, author of Love and I: Poems
Sponsored by Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, Comparative Literature, Translation Initiative, and Whitney Humanities Center
Registration link
Poster
4:30 pm, Zoom EST
Distinguished Speaker Series
Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author and naturalist
The story sounds apocryphal, but it’s actually true. In the spring of 1784, Mozart found a starling in a Viennese shop mimicking the motif from one of his own concertos, and he took the bird home as a pet. How did it come to pass that the sublime classical composer found inspiration in one of the world’s most ecologically despised species? The answer leads to a beautiful tangle of music theory, linguistics, the nature of creative inspiration, and the human relationship with the wild earth.
Sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities
Registration link
Poster
4 pm, Zoom EST
The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2010), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020). In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Whitney Humanities Center
Registration link
Poster
5 pm, Zoom EST
In honor of the publication of A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser, Meghan O’Rourke will have a discussion with Dan Chiasson, Shane McCrae, Maureen N. McLane, Srikanth Reddy, and Roger Reeves about the influence of James Merrill’s legacy: his dazzlingly witty letters, his cosmic vision, and his poetry’s trajectory.
Sponsored by The Yale Review, English Department’s Theory and Media Studies Colloquium, and Whitney Humanities Center
Registration link
Poster
6:30 pm, Zoom EST
This summer New York Review Books is reissuing William Gardner Smith’s 1963 classic, The Stone Face. The novel tells the tale of a young Black expatriate who takes refuge from American racism in Paris, only to find himself complicit in a racist order of another sort. At first, the City of Light seems close to idyllic: Simeon can do what he wishes and go where he pleases without fear. When he joins Algerians in their demonstration of October 17, 1961, however, and witnesses the shocking police violence, massacre, and arrest of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators, he discovers that the notion of France as colorblind is a myth and that racism reaches well beyond American shores.
Please join us on May 3, 2021, at 4 pm EST via Zoom for a roundtable discussion of this critically and culturally relevant work. Participants will include three specialists of the African American diaspora and the Algerian War:
Lia Brozgal, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, is the author of Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris (17 October 1961) and has written extensively on North African history and culture.
Adam Shatz, a writer and critic at the London Review of Books, has reported from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker; his preface will accompany the new edition of The Stone Face.
Tyler Stovall is the author of Paris Noir, a cultural history of African Americans in Paris. Former President of the American Historical Association, he is currently the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Fordham University. He has just published White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea.
Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, will moderate.
Cosponsored by the Department of French, Yale RITM, and Whitney Humanities Center
Registration link
4:00 pm, Zoom EST
The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
James McAuley, Global Opinions columnist, The Washington Post
In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. This talk explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle.
James McAuley is a European Affairs columnist for the Washington Post and recently received his PhD from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. The House of Fragile Things is his first book.
Sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and Whitney Humanities Center
Registration link
Poster
5 pm, Zoom EST
