Past Franke Visiting Fellows

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.

James McAuley is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post writing on European affairs. During his Franke Fellowship at the Whitney, he is continuing research on his next book, “Black Milk of Dawn.” While at Yale, he will also be finishing a short biography of the Zionist benefactor Edmond de Rothschild, for the Jewish Lives biography series at Yale University Press. This follows the publication in 2021 of his first book, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, also with Yale University Press. He earned his PhD in Modern European History at Oxford in 2016, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.

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In her public lecture, “What Is a Process?” novelist Sheila Heti, our Fall 2022 Franke Visiting Fellow, invites us into the processes she uses in the writing of her books—both the expected and the unexpected. She offers a glimpse into the novel she’s currently writing while she’s with us here in New Haven, and speaks about the role of collaboration with other people, and other domains, in the shaping of her ideas.

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? She recently published her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esmé Shapiro. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by the New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Motherhood was chosen by New York magazine and the critics of the New York Times as the Best Book of the year, and How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. Her nonfiction collaboration Women in Clothes, which includes the words of 639 women from around the world, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine, and has interviewed many writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey, and John Currin. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives and works in Toronto.

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4:00pm, Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), 136

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(Department of Anthropology and Whitney Humanities Center)

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Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, the Fall 2017 Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, will give a lecture titled “The Difficulty of Gift-Giving: Cybernetics and Postwar French Thought” on Wednesday, November 8, at 5 pm in Room 208 of the WHC.

A historian and theorist of digital media, Geoghegan is a senior lecturer in Media and Communications at Coventry University and a visiting associate professor in Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He also works as a curator and educational programmer for the Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. His research investigates how changes in media technology interweave with changes in popular culture, science, and the physical environment. He has edited essay collections on media philosopher Gilbert Simondon, on media and the occult, and on media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Geoghegan’s essays and translations appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, SubStance, IEEE Annals on the History of Computing, and Theory, Culture & Society. He is currently writing a book with Francesco Casetti on screening as a cultural technique that examines the history of managing environments and space through screen-based media technologies such as radar and global positioning systems.

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Since returning to New York from Europe in autumn 2011, Mr. Kimmelman has reshaped the public debate about urbanism, architecture, and architectural criticism, focusing on issues of public space, housing for the poor, parks and infrastructure, social equality, and public interest design not only in New York City but also in cities such as Cairo, Medellin, Louisville, and Paris. He spent four years based in Berlin covering Europe and the Middle East as the New York Times ”Abroad” columnist before turning to architecture. Mr. Kimmelman was the Times’s longtime chief art critic. He is a fellow at the London School of Economics and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

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A professor of English and creative writing at the American University of Beirut, Mr. Myers is the author of more than a dozen plays about politics, history, and cultural encounters, including Atwater: Fixin’ to Die; The Lynching of Leo Frank; Dead of Night, about the official murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton; Perfectly Clear, about Richard Nixon and the Watergate tapes; Heartland, a black comedy about white supremacists; and Painting Persia, about the 1840s expedition of French geographer Xavier Hommaire de Hell and painter Jules Laurens. He also cotranslated Jawad Al-Assadi’s Baghdadi Bath, which played Off-Broadway in 2009.

In lieu of a public talk at Yale, Mr. Myers staged a reading of his play Mesopotamia, about archaeologist, Arabist, diplomat, and spy Gertrude Bell and the British occupation of Iraq. The performance featured actress Kathleen Chalfant, directed by Evan Yionoulis of the Yale Drama School. In conjunction with the production, Mr. Myers curated an exhibition at the Gallery at the Whitney, “Gertrude Bell in Mesopotamia,” a collection of letters, maps, books, intelligence reports, and photographs (many by Bell herself). He gave a talk, “Painting the Theater of the East,” to the WHC Fellows.

Tuesday, October 20, “Overdoing It and Other Poems”

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Wednesday, October 24, “Thinking with Images”

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