Here’s a look at the Graduate Student Fellows joining the humanities center for the 2023-24 academic year. The competitively selected students actively participate in the center’s intensive, interdisciplinary intellectual environment.
A serendipitous succession of events led Graduate Student Fellow Laurel Taylor to discover Japan’s cell-phone novel, an early 2000s genre that made authors out of anonymous amateurs and readers out of millions of flip-phone users.
For sociocultural anthropology PhD candidate Rebecca Dudley, a Graduate Student Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, the soil tells the story. As she studies the legacy of the U.S.’s plantation system in contemporary industrial agriculture, the artifacts she recovers reveal the dark marks of slavery. The discovery of a 18th-century hoe collar in a Louisiana field triggers a retelling of one of the state’s most notorious slave conspiracies, at Pointe Coupée, and the iron forger whose testimony led to the conviction of 60 fellow enslaved laborers and the decapitation of 23. The specter of violence, embodied in that bit of iron rubble, still stains the land today.
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.
Juneteenth Keynote: From New Orleans to Galveston to St. Louis and Beyond
Missouri History Museum
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15June
Juneteenth Keynote: From New Orleans to Galveston to St. Louis and Beyond
Missouri History Museum | 5:30 PM
Join us for a riveting nine-generation family migration story from Texas to Missouri. Vanessa Slaughter, a native St. Louisan, will join Jim Vincent of the St. Louis African American History & Genealogy Society in a fireside chat to trace her family’s legacy to Galveston, Texas, in the 1860s. Each generation builds on the foundation of love, community, and freedom to give us inspiration to dig into our own family histories and celebrate Juneteenth as a community. The evening will kick off with a brief presentation about the history and meaning of the Juneteenth holiday by Dr. Geoff K. Ward of Washington University in St. Louis and will end with a live performance by the Community Gospel Choir of St. Louis, inspiring us to look deep into our own family legacies of migration, freedom, and community love.
Time devoted exclusively to research and writing is integral to academic productivity. Faculty fellowships provide the opportunity to make significant strides.
Apply for funding for humanities research, fellowships, reading groups and more
The humanities center facilitates the labor of humanists by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy, and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.