New RDE Cluster Grants boost graduate studies innovations
A new approach to funding from the RDE initiative provides a shot in the arm for departments and programs implementing changes to their graduate studies programming.
In digital worlds and on physical stages, directors invite audiences into the story
What happens when we inhabit the world of a famous story and the story seeps into our own? By analyzing performances of Shakespeare’s plays and Greek tragedies in four 21st-century contexts — a reconstructed historical playhouse, open-world theatre, virtual reality and augmented reality — Assistant Professor of Drama Elizabeth Hunter proposes a new theory of spectatorship in her current book project.
Dispatches from the ‘other’ France
At the same time J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” was alerting Americans to the social isolation, poverty and addiction that afflict poor white communities in Appalachia, Édouard Louis released his autobiographical novel about growing up gay in an industrial town, a rare tale of working-class French life. As French literature scholar Salvador Lopez Rivera relates, Louis is part of a new generation of French writers making sure these stories don’t get left out.
Modernist physiognomy
Faculty Fellow Anca Parvulescu’s current book project examines the human face as a site of interpretation, identity and aesthetic form in the literary experiments of modernist writers of the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s a practice rooted in physiognomy, the now-discredited theory that physical characteristics reveal the character within.
About the Center
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.
Read More About Our Mission and Our History
Funding new research in the humanities
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!
upcoming
events
Washington University Dance Theatre: WUDT'sNEXT
Edison Theatre
View EventDemocracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America with Heather Cox Richardson
Knight Center, Anheuser-Busch Dining Room
Professor of history and ‘Letters from an American’ author/podcaster Richardson discusses her new book.
View EventEurasianism: From a Bookish Philosophy to the Official Ideology of Putin’s Russia
DUC 248
View Event
The politics of time: The lessons of Sabbath for seeking justice
Rwanda’s privatized polis and the people in the path of progress
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.
Learn More