The year 2021 marks the 500th anniversary of Spain’s incursion into Mexico, setting off 300 years of colonial rule. Halfway around the world in the city of Genoa, a Jewish historian retold the near-contemporaneous story of this conquest to his readers, a record that scholar Martin Jacobs says reveals the tensions of the historian’s own history of persecution by the Spanish Empire.
Deep in the Japanese mountains where the cryptomeria are thick and time is forgotten, you may encounter a woman... In her new book, Rebecca Copeland (EALC) examines the yamamba, or Japan’s legendary mountain witch. For hundreds of years, the yamamba has represented women who defy cultural expectations.
The 2015 founding of the Women’s Mosque of America (WMA) in Los Angeles gave Muslim women in the U.S. something they hadn’t had access to before: the minbar, the platform from which a sermon is given. With her forthcoming book, scholar Tazeen Ali explores the dynamism of Islam and the women who interpret it, who approach the Qur’an as a tool to resist social hierarchies, build community and empower themselves.
Graduate student Alexandra Swanson (English) describes her experience at last summer’s Humanities Without Walls National Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop. Here, she shares the concrete career ideas they explored as highly employable PhDs, including ways that continue their strongest academic interests.
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
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 humanities center facilitates the labor of humanists by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy, and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.
Learn More