Humanities Now

Humanities Now, a new lecture series at the Whitney Humanities Center, is designed to spark deep thinking, inclusive deliberation, and smart action on current intellectual and social concerns. 

Founded in 2023 by WHC director Cajetan Iheka, Humanities Now convenes a thoughtful community to explore important topics in the humanities today. This exploration takes place through conversations with leading scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers who are shaping humanistic discourse, praxis, and activism with their cutting-edge work. Humanities Now derives impetus from a global vision of the humanities: one that embraces interdisciplinarity, reflects a range of disciplinary constellations, and accentuates the heterogenous humanistic traditions within the United States and across the world. It prioritizes innovative approaches to the humanities, especially those that break intellectual boundaries and dismantle walls between the university and broader communities.

We welcome suggestions for speakers/artists who bring fresh perspectives to enduring and new questions in the humanities.

2024–2025 Lectures

Chika Okeke-Agulu
Princeton University
Thursday, January 30, 2025 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

Gazbia Sirry and Egyptian Modernists in Nasser’s Revolutionary Egypt

This lecture comes out of a broader study of the mid-twentieth-century emergence of postcolonial strongmen in Africa, and artists’ response to this phenomenon. The focus of this lecture will be the work of the Egyptian artist Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), to illustrate how the country’s leading modernists, in the wake of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution, were swayed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s charisma, putting their art in the service of his brand of Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arabist ideology. But how did Sirry respond to Nasser’s increasingly repressive regime and the devastating outcome of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War? We follow the formal and tonal shifts in Sirry’s work as it engaged with, and was shaped by, Nasser’s and post-revolutionary Egypt’s political fortunes.

Chika Okeke-Agulu, an artist, critic and art historian, is Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, and Director of Africa World Initiative at Princeton University. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His most recent books include El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022); African Artists: From 1882 to Now (2021); Yusuf Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (2020). Okeke-Agulu was the Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford (2023), and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Cosponsored by History of Art

Sumana Roy
Writer and Poet
Thursday, September 12, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
320 York St. Alice Cinema (L01)

The Quest for the Plant Script

If plants could write, what stories would they tell us? What might we learn—about ourselves and the botanical world—if we learned to read, write, and translate a language rooted in vegetal life? 

Join Sumana Roy as she explores why these questions have captivated our writers, artists, thinkers, and scholars over the last hundred years. In this lecture, Roy traces the evolution of our century-long fascination with the “plant script,” a term she uses to describe our various attempts to parse a language from plants.

“The Quest for the Plant Script” begins with the Indian plant physiologist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s concept of torulipi—or “plant script”—a record of a plant’s responses to external stimuli written in their own “handwriting,” through which he hoped plants would write their autobiographies. Starting with Bose’s experiments and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the “language of flowers,” to poets writing about the syntax of falling leaves, to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants, or creating a “tree alphabet,” Roy examines our ongoing search for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.

Watch the Recording

Denise Ferreira da Silva
New York University
Thursday, October 10, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

On Interiority: An Exploration of the Infrastructures of Subjectivity

Join the Whitney Humanities Center for this Humanities Now lecture by artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Author of the field-changing books Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt, Ferreira da Silva writes on crucial global issues, which she approaches from an anticolonial black feminist perspective.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.

She is the author of scholarly books including Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and Unpayable Debt (2022) and coeditor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013).

In collaboration with Arjuna Neuman, her filmography includes Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023). With Valentina Desideri, she organized The Sensing Salon, a studio practice that expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts.  Ferreira da Silva has performed shows and given lectures in prominent artistic spaces, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), The Guggenheim and MoMA (NYC).

The day before Ferreira da Silva’s lecture, she and her codirector Arjuna Neuma will join us for a screening and discussion of their experimental film essay, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023). Come for the film and stay for a talkback with the directors, moderated by Yale professor of Spanish and Portuguese Santiago Acosta. Learn more about the screening here.

Adam Shatz
editor and author
Tuesday, November 12, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
L01

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon has been dead since 1961, yet his name is invoked with increasing frequency, and has itself become a kind of Rorschach test in discussions of white supremacy, the Middle East, and settler-colonialism. In his talk at the Whitney Humanities Center, Adam Shatz, the author of a new biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, will reflect on the Martinican psychiatrist’s life, work, and contemporary legacy.

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”

About The Rebel’s Clinic
In the era of Black Lives Matter and the war in Gaza, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. This searching biography tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life—and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and Department of French