Videos

Lori Gruen, Wesleyan University

Carceral Logics: An Abolitionist Critique

Mass incarceration is supported and sustained by carceral logics. In this lecture Professor Gruen will describe two types of carceral logics, discuss how they operate, and discuss reasons to abolish them.

Lori...

Eric Karpeles, writer, translator, and painter

Józef Czapski: Facing the Void

Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski lived into his ninety-seventh year, embodying the complex contradictions of the entire twentieth century. Having been witness to both Russian Revolutions of 1917 as well as the...

Namwali Serpell, Harvard University

Race Off: The Fantasy of Race Transformation

Namwali Serpell is the author of The Old Drift, which won the Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Fiction, the L.A. Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction,...

Khalil Muhammad, Harvard Kennedy School

The Origins and Durability of Anti-Black Racial Criminalization in the United States

This lecture historicizes the use of racial crime statistics as a technology of social difference to justify new white supremacist ideas as well as innovative forms of state violence, segregation, and discrimination...

Anne Applebaum, journalist, prize-winning historian, and staff writer for The Atlantic

The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why It Matters

The Soviet Gulag system was established in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, expanded under Stalin across the 1930s and into the war years, and did not reach its height until the early 1950s. Some 18 million people...

Lia Brozgal (UCLA), Adam Shatz (London Review of Books), Tyler Stovall (Fordham University), Alice Kaplan (Director of the Whitney Humanities Center)

A Celebration of William Gardner Smith’s THE STONE FACE

The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale brought together—via Zoom—three cultural critics and specialists of the African American diaspora and the Algerian War to discuss the much-anticipated NYRB edition of William...

Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida)—authors of The Teaching Archive—along with Caleb Smith (Yale). Moderated by Alice Kaplan (Director of the Whitney Humanities Center).

THE TEACHING ARCHIVE

A roundtable discussion of Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s new book The Teaching Archive (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which tells the story of nine literature courses taught at nine...

Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance

The Heart of Fiction

Why dwell on made-up stories? Why make them up in the first place? Can fiction, that pack of lies, aspire to some form of truth?

Hernan Diaz is the author of the novel In the Distance (2017), a...

Stephanie Smallwood, University of Washington

Centering the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Critique of Capital: Marx, Slavery, and the Problem of “Primitive Accumulation”

Stephanie Smallwood is Associate Professor of History and Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she is also a faculty associate of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies....

Massimiliano Tomba, University of California, Santa Cruz

Bringing His Own Skin to Market and Has Nothing to Expect but a Tanning: Dramatis Personae and Their Bodies

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, he taught political philosophy at the University of Padua. He has published several...