“Can you save more energy by buying 1 Prius and driving it 15 miles or by buying 3 Priuses and driving them 5 miles each?” In Michael R. Allen’s review of “Stop Saving the Planet” by historian and Sam Fox Research Fellow Jenny Price, he finds compelling evidence that this kind of picayune debate in today’s popular environmental movement allows bad actors to escape responsibility and action.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been key to unleashing a recent surge of cinematic stories about the FBI’s harassment of Black artists and activists of the civil rights era, writes William J. Maxwell, scholar of African-American literature and editor of “James Baldwin: The FBI File.”
In any year, University Archivist Sonya Rooney and her colleagues document Washington University’s regular business and usual affairs. When the COVID-19 pandemic stuck, they moved quickly to archive the campus community’s entirely out-of-the-ordinary experience.
What can film teach us about our current pandemic moment, if only we will listen? That question propels the Screening Contagion Film Series, organized by historian Corinna Treitel and artist Patricia Olynyk. With two upcoming panel discussions (April 8 and 29) and two recordings available for viewing now, they offer an overview of the series and the conversations they hope it ignites.
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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Pursuing new scholarly ideas about the world takes funding — whether it's for a two-month tour of research sites in Japan or a two-week trip to an archive to view materials available only there — that can be hard to find via regular channels. The Center for the Humanities fills this gap with a number of funding opportunities for Washington University faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Learn more about their stories!
The Center for the Humanities is celebrating National Poetry Month with a new installment of Life/Lines, the daily poetry practice. Novice and published poets alike are invited to create short poems in response to an email prompt sent weekdays through the month, beginning April 1. All poems — in any language — will be published on our website. For more information, or to sign up for the daily prompt, click the button below.
The humanities center facilitates the labor of humanists by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy, and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.
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