September 11, 2024
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings from the Whitney Humanities Center. I hope your summer was restful and that the promise of the new year remains invigorating. Our campus, the nation, and the world are in moments of transition. I write amidst the frenzy of presidential election campaigns in the United States. With over 60 countries heading to the polls to determine their next leaders, 2024 has been called the Year of Global Elections, and the year holds both the horizonal possibilities and risks of disappointment associated with the democratic process. Here at Yale, President Maurie McInnis—a humanities scholar—assumed office in July. All of us at the WHC extend our warm welcome to President McInnis. Listening to graduate alumni recollect their Whitney experience is one of many thrills of this job, and I cannot wait to hear about President McInnis’s experiences at the WHC when she was a graduate student in the History of Art. The WHC is also grateful for former President Salovey’s leadership.
Closer to home, we bid farewell to former Humanities Dean Katie Lofton and thank her for her exceptional service. I congratulate and look forward to working with the new Dean Marc Robinson, a friend of the Center, who was serving on the WHC executive committee at the time of his appointment. As we usher in the new year, reuniting with colleagues and students and meeting new ones, we are delighted to welcome Michelle Rada, inaugural recipient of the exciting new Franke Postdoctoral Fellowship, tied to the Franke Seminar and Lectures in the Humanities. Michelle comes to us from Brown University, where she completed her Ph.D. in English. Her current book manuscript threads together innovations in modernist literature, architecture, and design with the contemporaneous rise of the psychoanalytic clinic.
I am also honored to welcome the Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, who will serve as this year’s Franke Visiting Fellow. Jennifer is the multiple award-winning author of the acclaimed novels Kintu and A Girl Is a Body of Water, among other notable publications. The New York Review of Books has described her prose as “poetic and nuanced, brilliant and sly, openhearted and cunning, balancing discordant truths in wise ruminations.” And A Girl Is a Body of Water is, in the words of the novelist and critic Namwali Serpell, “a wonder, as clear, vivid, moving, powerful, and captivatingly unpredictable as water itself.” For her work, Jennifer was awarded the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2014 and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2018.
Also joining us at the WHC are internal Fellows drawn from departments, schools, and centers across Yale. The weekly Fellows Forum is sure to be especially stimulating this year, given the range of scholarly and artistic interests represented by our mix of internal and external fellows. I hope you will join me in making the fellows feel welcome and ensuring that they cherish their time as fellows.
Our slate of programming promises to match the intellectual energy, boundless passion, and interdisciplinary range of our fellows. Kickstarting the Humanities Now series on September 12 with a lecture titled “The Quest for the Plant Script” is the writer, scholar, and poet Sumana Roy, author of How I Became a Tree and the recently published Provincials. The series also features lectures and screenings by Denise Ferreira da Silva—her film with Arjuna Neuman, “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims,” and a lecture on interiority and subjectivity—lectures by Adam Shatz on Fanon, and Chika Okeke-Agulu on African art. The Franke Lectures in the Humanities and the associated seminar (taught by Fatima Naqvi) will welcome a range of distinguished scholars and practitioners to reflect on the Architecture of Illness in Spring 2025. Be sure to also check out the peerless lineup for Films at the Whitney, including a series on World Documentary Today. Finally, the Faculty Book Celebration and Holiday Party returns this year, on November 20, to recognize accomplishments in humanities research and usher in the festive season.
Our distinguished named lectures feature outstanding speakers whose presence will vivify campus. I am pleased to announce that the scholar and activist Angela Davis will deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values (April 15–16) on Incarceration. The 2024–2025 Finzi-Contini Lecturer is Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy and other critically acclaimed works. This highly anticipated event is scheduled for February 13.
There is a saying among my people, the Igbo people of Nigeria, about the tragedy of the host whose invitation the community refuses at the eleventh hour: what will become of the food and entertainment that’s been prepared? I hope you will accept the invitation to partake in the intellectual and social engagements that we have curated for your cerebral/culinary nourishment. Please visit our website and mark your calendars. While you are at it, be sure to complete this one-question survey to suggest speakers you would like to see on campus. The WHC is our collective treasure; it thrives only with your cooperative participation. I look forward to seeing you in HQ.
With best wishes for the academic year,
Cajetan
Cajetan Iheka
Professor of English
Director, Whitney Humanities Center