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.
The former Faculty Fellow’s two-year term begins in January 2024, after a fall 2023 leave.
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.
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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!
WashU scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences are invited to jump-start their summer writing.
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The humanities center facilitates the labor of humanists by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy, and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.
Learn More