‘The White Tiger’ tells the story of an Indian servant’s rise from a subsistence existence to entrepreneurial excess — a man who wrote his own ending, thanks to the fortunes of the global city. Yet, even in this tale of individual triumph, writes historian Shefali Chandra, the film powerfully demonstrates the resiliency of the caste structures that precipitated his abject origins as well as his opportunistic ascent.
When Winston Churchill first uttered the term “Iron Curtain” in 1946, the metaphor gave a physical form to the East versus West conflict that was dividing the European map. But what of the people who lived in this contested area? Where did they belong? PhD candidate Katja Perat, a Graduate Student Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, writes about how Cold War-era questions of shame and sexuality shaped Central European fiction.
PhD candidate Olivia Lott was named as a finalist for a prominent literary award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In this Q&A, Lott talks about the process of bringing ‘Katabasis’ to new audiences, about her reaction to the PEN shout-out, and for her recommendations of additional must-read translated poetry books.
Two critical conditions of the year 2020 — the major funding cuts to local nonprofits due to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the major groundswell of support for social justice activism following the killing of George Floyd — provided the impetus for an innovative community outreach effort by the Divided City initiative over the summer.
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 chairs and directors of Humanities departments and programs at Washington University in St. Louis have prepared this statement. In times of severe challenges, we feel that it is crucial that we avail ourselves of the invaluable resources that humanities scholarship and education offer.
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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