September 16, 2025
Dear colleagues:
On behalf of the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC) team, I welcome you with great pleasure to the new academic year. I hope your summer was rejuvenating and/or productive as you hoped. Amidst the quiet in HQ during the summer, our team prepared the annual report and planned this year’s activities. Our annual report confirmed that last year was a highly successful one, with quality programming, brilliant interlocutors, and a thoughtful and engaged audience at our events. I urge you to review the range and depth of those projects here and plan to join us for an even more exciting year starting this fall.
We return this semester to an uncertain campus environment with funding challenges and other threats to our prized intellectual community. But as I have told colleagues who have wondered about humanistic programming, this moment demands renewal and recommitment, not retreat. A renewal of our commitment to intellectual inquiry; a recommitment to the advancement of thought and truth; and a renewal of the free exchange of ideas that promote human and planetary flourishing. Our moment demands the kind of interdisciplinary reflections and exchanges that the WHC has long stood for. In these challenging times, we stand ready to be a space for connection beyond departments and programs, an inspiring space for faculty, staff, students, and community members to recommit themselves to the values that the humanities cultivate best.
For us at the WHC, there is no better time for renewal and recommitment as we prepare for the 45th anniversary of the founding of the Center in 2026. From its original home at 53 Wall Street to our current space within the Humanities Quadrangle (HQ) and across the tenure of the great leaders of the Center that I am honored to follow, the WHC has maintained its standing as a vibrant hub of intellectual exchange and dialogue across campus and between Yale and the New Haven community. All year and culminating with the anniversary conference on April 16 and 17, 2026, we will celebrate the humanities at Yale and ponder its future in the face of a rapidly changing intellectual and social landscape. The anniversary conference—The Humanities, the University, and the World—will welcome leading thinkers and public intellectuals, including Amitav Ghosh and Claudia Rankine, to engage with our brilliant community. Please save the date and check this space for additional information about this special occasion as it becomes available.
We are proud of the conference lineup as well as the slate of speakers and events that will precede it. Our Humanities Now series, in its third year, will feature lectures by the Columbia professor and journalist Howard French on his new book on Kwame Nkrumah and global Blackness (September 25), by Daniel Mendelsohn on his acclaimed new translation of The Odyssey (October 20), and by Joan Copjec discussing her latest monograph on Abbas Kiarostami (November 6). Copjec’s lecture will be followed by the screening and discussion of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry on November 7.
The Finzi-Contini and Tanner Lectures promise brilliant outings again this year. I hope you will join me in welcoming Jhumpa Lahiri for her Finzi-Contini Lecture on September 29 at 4:30pm. Lahiri’s lecture is titled “Quiver and Fixity: On Rereading Jude the Obscure.” Another highlight of this year’s programming is the Tanner Lectures to be delivered by Harvard professor and public intellectual Jill Lepore on “The Rise of the Artificial State” on February 4–6, 2026. Given her respected and longstanding work in American history, law, and politics, and with a thematic focus on government, the state, and AI—pressing issues of our time—Professor Lepore is the ideal speaker for the Tanners in the year that the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding. We hope you will join us for these lectures and other events this year, including Films at the Whitney series on cinematic labor, Work/Place (fall), and the cinema of migrations in the spring.
I am looking forward to these events and to welcoming the internal and visiting fellows joining us this year. Colleagues from across campus will be joined by our Franke Postdoctoral Fellow Carolyn Bailey and Franke Visiting Fellows Samira Negrouche and Julian Lucas. Dr. Bailey, who will support the Franke Seminar on Media and Protection while preparing a book manuscript on the concept of “biosurveillance media”—media that track, identify, and categorize human life, joins us from Harvard University, where she recently completed her Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies. Negrouche and Lucas will spend the fall and spring semester, respectively, as Franke Visiting Fellows developing new projects. A brilliant writer and poet, Negrouche joins us from Algeria while Lucas comes to us from The New Yorker, where he is a widely read staff writer. Our visitors are excited to engage with members of our community and visit classes. I hope you will join me in giving them a warm welcome to Yale and attend the events featuring their work.
With best wishes for the academic year, I look forward to seeing you in HQ and around campus.
Cajetan Iheka
Professor of English
Director, Whitney Humanities Center