When the final episode of ‘Derry Girls,’ set in late 1990s Northern Ireland, dropped last fall, it presaged an important milestone – the inevitable remembering the Good Friday Agreement referendum, sparked by its upcoming 25th anniversary. Irish literature PhD candidate Ian Clark walks us through the series’ complicated relationship with the Troubles and what it says about how people remember the violence today.
Italian scholar Michael Sherberg’s current translation project calls attention to the battle for hearts and minds in Florence after the Black Death.
A major demographic change is underway in the United States, one that will see whites lose their majority status by the year 2050. Alongside scholars of “whiteness studies,” authors such as Dave Eggers and Claire Messud have grappled with this impending reality in literary works that foreground issues of race — the white race. With her new book project, “Ugly White People: Whiteness in Contemporary American Literature,” literary scholar Stephanie Li sets out to explore how white writers display this new understanding of white racialized behavior.
In her current book project, “An Intellectual History of the Sex Worker Left,” Faculty Fellow Heather Berg will analyze two centuries of criticism by sex workers of non-sex work, unpaid sex, citizenship and bourgeois morality. It’s a story, she says, about what sex workers think rather than about what they do.
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!
Author David Kertzer in conversation with Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
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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.
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