Franke Lectures in the Humanities

The Franke Lectures in the Humanities take place in conjunction with an upper-level seminar in the Humanities Program. The Franke Lectures take important conversations in the humanities beyond the classroom with a series of public lectures. Thanks to the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, the Franke Lectures in the Humanities bring distinguished scholars to Yale University, where they present vital work in the humanities to a wide and general audience.

The Spring 2025 Franke Lectures in the Humanities will follow the theme of the Yale College seminar “Architecture of Illness,” taught by Professor Fatima Naqvi and postdoctoral fellow Michelle Rada.

Join distinguished scholars in the medical and health humanities as they explore how the rise of the hospital and clinical spaces has shaped people’s experiences of illness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. These public lectures will appeal to those interested in biopolitics, the history of medicine, concepts of care, hospital design and architecture, contagion, and ideas about health and sickness.

Michelle Rada, the inaugural Franke Postdoctoral Fellow, is a scholar and editor with research interests in psychoanalysis, literary and visual modernism, feminism, media studies, and critical theory. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University (2024). Her current book manuscript threads together innovations in modernist literature, architecture, and design with the contemporaneous rise of the psychoanalytic clinic.

Spring 2025 Lectures

Elizabeth Otto
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Monday, February 10, 2025 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

Bauhaus Architectures of Illness, Health, and Race: Johannes Itten’s Mazdaznan Teaching at the Early Bauhaus

Germany’s Bauhaus (1919–1933) is remembered for its minimalist modern design and globally influential art pedagogy. However, during its early years, in the wake of the First World War, the Bauhaus was also a hotbed of esoteric theories on spirituality and well-being that were central to the art and design produced there. The central figure in this Bauhaus reform movement was Johannes Itten, the influential founder of the Bauhaus’s preliminary course, the mandatory introduction required for all students. Itten centered his teaching on the ideas of Mazdaznan, a new religion that held the body as the key site for spiritual self-improvement and that dominated Bauhaus philosophy, art, and even diet. This talk explores how ideas of illness, health, and race played out in Bauhaus architecture and design of these turbulent, early years.

Elizabeth Otto is Director of the Humanities Institute and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019) and Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2005), and the coauthor of Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her curatorial work includes the summer 2024 blockbuster exhibition “Bauhaus and National Socialism,” held in the German city of Weimar. She is currently working on a book on Bauhaus members’ work in National Socialist Germany.

Poster

 

Beatriz Colomina
Princeton University
Monday, February 17, 2025 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

When Bacteria Rule the World: Notes Toward a Trans-species Architecture

Western architecture has always been understood in terms of the body—more precisely the athletic white male body endlessly redrawn from Renaissance treatises to modern architecture manifestoes, from Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier—a perfected body immersed in geometric systems of proportions—a fiction that excludes most of humanity.

Human-centered design sounds good, but it has been terrible for humans, other species, and the planet. The human is not one thing but an endlessly complex ever changing trans-species collaboration. The human is just a bag of bacteria, and bacteria have been around for billions of years, while the human is a very recent arrival and might already be on the way out. We are nothing without all these foreigners. We live in them more than they live in us.

What would a probiotic architecture be? Probably it would be like our gut, more porous, versus the prophylactic attitude of modern architecture. We used to live intimately with all the bacteria of the soil, the plants and other animals. And we may want to reconnect with this diversity of bacteria, embracing them.

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, the Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture, and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Media and Modernity program at Princeton University. She writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality, and media and her work has been translated in more than 25 languages. Her books include Sexuality and Space (1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold (2010), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016), X-Ray Architecture (2019), and Radical Pedagogies (2022).

Poster

Eve Blau
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Monday, April 7, 2025 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

Building Resistance

In 1919 the newly elected Social Democratic city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of municipal reforms designed to reshape the social and economic structure of the Austrian capital along socialist lines. The cornerstone of this program was a network of health and welfare services that were distributed throughout the city to provide “cradle-to-grave” care, counseling, and instruction in all aspects of public health and welfare. It involved the construction of 400 buildings in which housing and social institutions were distributed throughout the city. Red Vienna was a project to change society by changing the city; a project that saw architecture as playing a major role in that effort. Through a close reading of the architecture, the lecture will explore the interrelation of politics and built form, and the complex processes whereby the connection between social program and urban architectural form was forged in Red Vienna.

Eve Blau is the Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University where she is a professor of the history and theory of urban form at the Graduate School of Design, and Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. A principal concern of her research is the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, environmental, and technological conditions. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world. Her books include The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934; Baku: Oil and Urbanism; Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice; Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe; Architecture and Its Image.

Poster