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.

Spring 2024 Lectures

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Brown University

Thursday, March 7, 2024 | 4:30 pm

Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)

Alice Cinema (L01)

Unlearning Together at the Thresholds of Museums

Ariella Azoulay engages with the museum as a world-destroying technology and addresses the impossibility of decolonizing colonial museums without decolonizing the world, with a special focus on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world.

The day before Azoulay’s lecture, she will join us for a screening of her film The World Like a Jewel in the Hand—Unlearning Imperial Plunder II. The screening will take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 4:30 pm, in Alice Cinema (L01). Learn more about the screening here.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, as well as a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. She is the author of several books, including The Jewelers of the Ummah (Verso); La résistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik); Potential History—Unlearning Imperialism (Verso); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books); and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press). Azoulay is also known for her film essays: The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023); Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019); and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Her exhibition credits include Errata (Fundació Tàpies, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020) and The Natural Violence of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Poster

Method and Decolonizing Praxis in Literary Studies

Friday, March 29, 2024 | 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)

276

A colloquium on vital books in the humanities

The theoretical underpinnings and praxis of literary studies have come under scrutiny in influential books published in recent years. Focusing on two such books, this event appraises the state of criticism, its value and suppositions, and future directions. Panelists discuss the significance of Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth (Chicago 2023), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge 2023), edited by Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, while pursuing productive lines of inquiry beyond the texts. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear and engage leading scholars of literary criticism, including Ankhi Mukherjee, Ato Quayson, Debjani Ganguly, Elaine Scarry, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Joe Cleary, Jonathan Kramnick, and Paul Saint-Amour.

Schedule

12:15 LUNCH
(for those who RSVP by March 23)

1:00 DECOLONIZING THE ENGLISH LITERARY CURRICULUM
Joe Cleary, Yale University
Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Johns Hopkins University
Moderated by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Yale University

2:15 ON METHOD: CRITICISM AND TRUTH
Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford
Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
Elaine Scarry, Harvard University
Moderated by Anastasia Eccles, Yale University

3:30 LITERARY FUTURES AND FUTURES OF LITERARY CRITICISM: A CONVERSATION
Jonathan Kramnick, Yale University
Ato Quayson, Stanford University
Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford
Moderated by Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Johns Hopkins University

Poster

Willie James Jennings

Yale Divinity School

Thursday, April 18, 2024 | 4:00 pm

Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)

Alice Cinema (L01)

To Build a Sad Land: Coloniality, Racial Reasoning, and the Imagined Built Environment of Christian Zionism

At the place where a Christian doctrine of salvation joins nationalism and private property, we meet the workings of Christian Zionism. As a form of political theology, it presents a particular configuration of the body, the building, and design calibrated to enact human participation in divine providence and sovereignty on the ground. It also creates the Jewish and the Palestinian subject, each constituted within a colonial plantation vision of existence. Yet the sad land Christian Zionism creates participates in the logics of territoriality and coloniality that shape the tragedies of our current built environments. Drawing on work from his forthcoming two-volume work on the Christian doctrine of creation, and specifically volume two on race, theology, and the built environment, Dr. Jennings in this lecture explores the challenges of thinking life between territoriality, racial existence, and a religious imagination calibrated through ownership.

Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at the Yale Divinity School. His book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale 2010) was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. His most recent book examines the problems of theological education within Western education: After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020). Jennings is now working on a major monograph provisionally entitled Unfolding the World: Recasting a Christian Doctrine of Creation as well as a finishing a book of poetry entitled The Time of Possession. Writing in the areas of liberation theologies, cultural identities, and anthropology, Jennings has authored more than forty scholarly essays and nearly two dozen reviews, as well as essays on academic administration and blog posts for Religion Dispatches. Jennings is an ordained Baptist minister.