Center for the Humanities

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Film Study: Film Exhibition

The Film and Media Studies Program celebrates its 20th anniversary at Washington University with a symposium that takes a close look at film exhibition, movie theater architecture, screening technology, and the social, political, cultural, and economic infrastructures in which film cultures are embedded. Film scholar Diane Wei Lewis introduces the work of one of its speakers, who has found a history of black film exhibition that developed quite apart from the racially segregated theaters of the 1910s.

3.21.19 | Read the Story

Human Ties Features

Baby Talk: Listening to the ‘Little Guy’ in Medieval French Literature

Medieval writers viewed children, especially infants, to be the truest representatives of what it means to be human. Scholar Julie Singer is taking a look at what those writers were trying to communicate when they attributed language to their youngest characters. “For these writers,” Singer notes, “there are many truths that only the most marginalized voices can express.”

3.15.19 | Read the Story

Human Ties Features

Tradition and Transformation: Clara Schumann and the Creation of Classical Music

Nineteenth-century concert pianist Clara Schumann’s life story is the stuff of movies. (In Hollywood’s version, Katherine Hepburn played Schumann in 1947’s Song of Love.) But it’s her status as one of the Romantic age’s preeminent performers and her role in shaping the music and culture of what we now understand as “classical music” that enticed musicologist Alexander Stefaniak to focus on Schumann for his current book project.

2.26.19 | Read the Story

Human Ties Features, News

Afro-Surrealism: What Black Is and Can Be

Afro-surrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that responds to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the experience of blackness. WashU graduate students Lacy Murphy (Art History & Archaeology) and Kevin McCoy (Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts) write about the movement and two of its leading practitioners, who will take part in an on-campus conversation, “Afrosurrealism/Futurism: Radical Black Imagination,” on March 1.

2.19.19 | Read the Story

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.

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upcoming
events

The Biggs Family Residency in Classics: Dr. Susan Rotroff

March 25 - March 28, 2019

Various on campus; see website

Humanities grad students wanted for research symposium; submissions open through March 10

Save the date! George Sanchez (McLeod Lecture), Sept. 27, 2019

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.

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