People living together in society have struck a bargain, writes philosopher Matthew Babb, that trades personal freedom for favorable social and productivity outcomes. Babb teases an interdisciplinary January conference that looks into questions of conscience, coercion and freedom.
Peter Benson is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the American Culture Studies program. In this pastiche piece, Benson imagines his alter ego as a commentator at an on-campus forum discussing Jonah Hill’s new film, mid90s, with the filmmaker himself. Playing with screenwriting conventions and quoting heavily from the music, films and books of the era, Benson answers the question, “What did you think of the film?”
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson takes on the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus for three linked lectures, Nov. 13-15. But first, Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities director Joseph Loewenstein introduces us to two of Robinson’s major works, citing the skills and stories that seized even a president’s attention.
During a 12-year period, filmmaker Claude Landzmann filmed interviews with the witnesses to the Holocaust, survivors, bystanders and perpetrators alike. He shot more than 230 hours of footage and included 9.5 hours of it in his magnum opus, Shoah (1985). The remaining archived material (95 percent of the total), writes scholar Erin McGlothlin, has been a boon to scholars of film and history.
The human fingerprint maps our identity, the ties that bind us, the lingering traces we leave on this earth. As humanists, we explore the durability as well as the fragility of the human condition — opening windows onto worlds near to home and oceans away, worlds we interpret through stories and images, poems and performance, history and narratives, sounds and silence. At Washington University in St. Louis, the Center for the Humanities facilitates the labor of humanists by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy, and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.
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