July 16, 2024
Asked recently by a colleague how I would describe my work as director of the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), I responded: busy, exhilarating, and productive. The response stands as I complete my first year as director, which has been not only eventful but also rewarding. The opportunities to meet colleagues and become familiar with their fantastic work within HQ have been transformative, as has the congregational affordance of the WHC, which allowed us to welcome leading scholars and artists to share their visions of the world with the Yale community. Amidst the violent conflicts and other challenges plaguing the globe during the 2023–2024 academic year, including wars in Sudan, Ethiopia and Ukraine, and the Israel-Palestine conflict, the WHC offered a site for free expression, rigorous inquiry, and thoughtful deliberation on human values. The Center’s fellowship program, robust programming, and co-sponsorship of research activities reaffirmed the importance of the interdisciplinary humanities in times of crisis.
We learned a great deal from the 35 WHC Fellows, drawn from across schools, libraries, archives, and centers at Yale, that formed the 2023–24 cohort. The group’s intellectual diversity, generosity, and camaraderie enriched weekly lectures and the discussions that followed. These Wednesday talks were a highlight of each week for being not only intellectually formidable but also often emotionally memorable: who could forget the richness of Regina Kunzel’s opening lecture on the historical intersection of psychiatry and queerness in the United States, or Patrick Weil’s memorable psychoanalytic reading of Woodrow Wilson? Lectures foregrounded the oppressive dimensions of slavery, colonialism, and global capital, but were also attentive to lines of flight, to the subversive possibilities at scenes of subjection. Thus, Laura Barraclough reoriented the history of the US National Trail System conventionally a narrative of settler agency, to foreground indigenous interruptions, while Kyama Mugambi highlighted African subjectivities in the practice of Christianity on the continent.
Fellows also explored the surfaces and plumbed the depths of cultural productions, including literature, film, performance, and art, to transform understandings of phenomena, shedding light on the past and its significance for the present and future. Kimberly Jannarone’s work on mass performance in the Czech Republic and Alessandro Giammei’s presentation on costume in Italy treat spectacular displays as insightful locations of culture. The epistemological possibilities of art vis-à-vis colonial relations emerged in several talks, including Cécile Fromont’s and Lisa Voigt’s meditations on early modern print and artistic cultures.
Ideas of translation shaped the work at the Center this year, as fellows tackled the affordances and contingencies of recalibrating their work for an interdisciplinary audience; fellows also took on the practice and scholarship of translation. Sonam Kachru’s moving talk on translations of Kashmiri poetry and Riley Soles’s inspiring lecture on translations of the Lotus Sutra have stayed with me. Both fellows upheld translation as an act of creative writing and interpretation, involving artistic freedom as well as a sense of responsibility. Kaiama Glover embodied the translator’s task in a theoretical craft talk on Afro-Fluency, a generative template that guides her approach to translating Haitian literature. I will delight in the joys of our sumptuous meals and conversations in Fellows Hall for a long time.
The global orientation of the WHC motivated a new series, Humanities Now, which kicked off in September 2023 with a performance and conversation between the Nigerian American writer Chigozie Obioma and the Tanzanian music star Lady Jaydee. The series is designed to engage leading scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers who are shaping humanistic discourse, praxis, and activism with their innovative 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 inventive approaches to the humanities, especially those that break intellectual boundaries and dismantle walls between the university and broader communities. The impetus for the inaugural music-literature interface was a Financial Times article wherein Obioma listed Lady Jaydee’s music as inspiration for his writing. The pair’s conversation and Lady Jaydee’s performance brought colleagues, students, and the larger community to the Schwarzman Center. It was especially gratifying to meet attendees from the larger New Haven community, who relished the opportunity to visit Yale for a performance by an East African artist. The interdisciplinary and boundary-breaking qualities of the first event carried through subsequent ones: Mark Anthony Neal reoriented the contours of Black masculinity with his autobiographical rendition on Black fatherhood; Ariella Aïsha Azoulay intervened in contemporary discourse on the museum and colonial plunder. In the final event of the year, Willie James Jennings’s talk, at once scriptural and theoretical, offered a provocation on modes of habitation that can serve as alternatives to the obsession with territoriality and ownership in Christian Zionism.
Humanities Now also featured two book events this year, the first on Gary Tomlinson’s recent The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning (2023). The book’s “scope of meaning” and its meditation on the subject transcend disciplines, even as it locates its intervention at the core of what it means to be human. A panel of Yale colleagues responded to the book, debating questions such as the nature of meaning; what creatures have this affordance; meaning’s relationship to information; and what to do with non-human species transmitting information without meaning—how might we respond to meaninglessness?
The endowed lectures at the WHC remain highlights of the year, with talks that drew a sizeable audience from across campus. The writer Teju Cole delivered a brilliant lecture on the three final works of the dearly missed Yale treasure and Nobel Laureate, Louise Glück. Cole, with the characteristic erudition that makes him one of today’s most exciting readers of literature and culture, showcased the aliveness and rich sensibilities in the archive of the ordinary that constitutes Glück’s poetry. With gratitude for the ongoing collaboration between the WHC and The Yale Review, I have enjoyed reading the revised version that appeared in the Summer 2024 issue.
The Tanner Lectures, a collaborative project between the President’s Office and the WHC, were a resounding success this year. The remarkable lectures, delivered by Rob Nixon, Barron Professor of Environmental Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University, integrated environmental humanities, environmental justice, neuroscience, and forest science. Professor Nixon’s first lecture focused on inequities in the great outdoors, where indigent communities and communities of color have limited access to the benefits of outdoor leisure and can in fact be exposed to dangers outside. In the second lecture, he highlighted research on forest thinking, arguing that its cooperative disposition can counteract the individualist inclination of neoliberalism that is wrecking the planet. Professor Nixon also met in small groups with graduate students and members of Yale’s Environmental Humanities community.
The Franke Seminar and Fellowship allowed us to welcome distinguished writers and scholars to the WHC. The generosity of the Franke Seminar Fund enabled Ayesha Ramachandran’s seminar on Global Lyric to invite distinguished poets and critics of poetry to interact with seminar participants and the larger public on the state of the field. The seminar readings and guest lectures demonstrated the rich traditions of poetry and poetic thought that thrive around the world.
We were also fortunate to have the writer and journalist Rozina Ali in residence as Franke Visiting Fellow during the spring 2024 semester. Ali inspired us with her lecture on “Islamophobia Yesterday and Today,” and with her participation alongside Mark Oppenheimer in a panel discussion on Islamophobia and Antisemitism. Although selected before the outbreak of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Ali’s presence was assuring and illuminating, with her class visits, lectures, and responses providing a nuanced understanding of the challenges in the Middle East. I am delighted to welcome the Ugandan writer Jennifer Makumbi, author of the acclaimed Kintu, as Franke Visiting Fellow for 2024–25.
The Whitney Publishing Project thrived this year, with an inaugural Faculty Book Celebration held in December 2023 and a slate of events aimed at supporting publishing, including the visit of Sharmila Sen (Editorial Director, Harvard University Press) as editor-in-residence. The Faculty Book Celebration convened faculty and colleagues to celebrate books published within the past year. Infused with the holiday atmosphere, the relaxed event featured remarks from Dean Kathryn Lofton, congratulating the authors and pressing the significance of humanistic scholarship in this fraught moment. The HQ entrance monitors feature the 144 books that we celebrated at the gathering. The celebration culminates the WHC’s involvement in the book publishing ecosystem at Yale, wherein several projects received funding from the Center as works-in-progress, were presented as fellows’ talks, and more recently, could be discussed with the editor-in-residence. Sharmila Sen met with faculty colleagues and postdoctoral fellows to discuss their writing projects and to provide feedback during her visit in March 2024. These one-on-one meetings were preceded by a conversation between Sen and Yale History Professor Sunil Amrith on the dynamics of scholarly publishing in the humanities. Other activities of the Whitney Publishing Project can be found in the report that follows.
The highlighted events and visitors are by no means exhaustive of the programming that the WHC initiated or supported this year. Faculty colleagues benefited from the Hilles Publication Fund and the Griswold Faculty Research Fund, supporting publication and translation subventions, and research activities, respectively. The WHC also sponsored research working groups, graduate students’ work, conferences, and events that elevate the intellectual life of the University and serve the Center’s mission of being the hub for humanistic work at Yale. In this report, you will also read about this year’s cohort of Environmental Humanities Graduate Fellows who come from departments across Yale to form a community of intellection and socialization.
I am pleased with the WHC’s astonishing collaborative range this year: from sustaining our relationship with the Environmental Humanities Program, to collaborating with the Schwarzman Center on Humanities Now; from a brilliant partnership with the Yale Film Archive on a retrospective marking the centenary of the birth of the “father” of African cinema, Sembene Ousmane, to a film series with Yale University Art Gallery, we succeeded in deepening the study and scope of the humanities at Yale.
Cajetan Iheka
Professor of English
Director, Whitney Humanities Center
Read more about our recent work in our 2023–2024 annual report!