The number of COVID-19 diagnoses grows day by day, but the unequal rate of infection among Black and Latinx people and white people remains constant. Looking back at the AIDS epidemic, René Esparza, assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, finds a striking similarity in the U.S.’s historical treatment of viruses that disproportionally affect minority communities.
“Be your ‘authentic’ self”: This counsel is earnestly repeated to those seeking jobs, relationships, leadership roles, political office. Is it really that simple? Faculty Fellow and philosopher Allan Hazlett pushes back on this conventional wisdom in his current book project, “The Wages of Authenticity.” Are there times when being inauthentic is a kindness? Are there times when being authentic is cruel? Hazlett responds to the ethical dilemmas these questions provoke and more.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Norwegian sailors, businesspeople and missionaries moved and settled throughout Asia, Africa and Oceania, thanks in part to their home country’s massive shipping force. In his book-in-progress, “Sounding the Seven Seas: Norwegian Ships and ‘World Music’ at the Margins of Empire, 1850–1950,” ethnomusicologist Patrick Burke investigates their encounters with a wide variety of unfamiliar musical traditions, which helped to create Europeans’ understandings (and misperceptions) of the music of the global South.
In a season steeped in dark magic, flesh-ripping beasts, and mysterious hauntings, what is the scariest thing about “Lovecraft Country”? Genre literature scholar Michael Sanders on the “unnamed horror” of the HBO series.
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.
Geraldo Cadava, Associate Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University
View EventSeminar and lecture with Ian Bogost, the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology
View EventAbbe Shriber, Tyson Scholar of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
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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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