From the Quadrangle
August 30, 2023 | Megan O'Donnell
If you’ve visited the Humanities Quadrangle in the past several days, you may have noticed the covers of books by your colleagues displayed on one of the monitors at the front entrance. In a team effort to publicly support and celebrate the wide...
May 12, 2023 | Diane Berrett Brown
I write, briefly, to convince you to come to a free screening of the film Diva (1981) this Friday at 7:00 p.m., sponsored by Films at the Whitney. Given the fickle nature of trends, if you were born after, say, 1980, you may have never heard of this...
April 10, 2023 | Thomas Munro
Up on a hill just above the Hudson River stands a rather strange house. Though the house looks over the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and the town of Catskill, New York, its rough stone walls would seem right at home in a Tuscan villa or an English castle....
March 8, 2023 | Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson
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?”
There are other terms to talk about cinema from more than one place—...
March 3, 2023 | Megan O'Donnell
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...
January 23, 2023 | Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson
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. The Franke Visiting Fellows Program allows the WHC to host one fellow each year for a...
December 5, 2022 | Ekalan Hou
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. But later—and in a different...
November 9, 2022 | Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson
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,”...
October 19, 2022 | Morgane Cadieu
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...
May 11, 2022 | Xinyu Guan
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....