Upcoming Events

WEBINARS AND EVENTS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Friday, September 8 & Saturday, September 9
Popular Romance Fiction: The Literature of Hope conference

Popular Romance Fiction: The Literature of Hope is a conference event occurring on Friday, September 8 - Saturday, September 9, 2023 at Yale University. This interactive gathering brings bestselling romance writers together with scholars, students, readers, and the public for two days of conversation and events at Yale and in the New Haven community about the nation’s most popular literary genre. Through discussion panels, a romance writing workshop, documentary screening, historical exhibition, Elm City LIT Fest collaboration, a special keynote event, and more, we examine romance fiction in expansive ways that move at and beyond its surface appearances, exploring its political, material, racial, feminist, and religious histories and manifestations. Confirmed speakers include Roxane Gay, Adriana Herrera, Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, Julie Moody-Freeman, Sarah MacLean, Radclyffe, and others. For more information and to register for the conference, please visit romancefictionconference.yale.edu.

Tuesday, September 19 | 6:00pm EDT | Ives Library, 133 Elm Street
“Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era"

Join us for a conversation with Matthew Jacobson, Director of Public Humanities and Sterling Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University, and Robin D. G. Kelley, the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, about Professor Jacobson's new book, Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History (University of California Press, 2023). The book offers a deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.

This event is presented in partnership with the New Haven Free Public Library as part of the ongoing Democracy in America series. Please note for this event we are returning to an in-person format at the New Haven Free Public Library (Ives Main Library, 133 Elm Street). The event will not be livestreamed, but it will be recorded and shared to the Public Humanities YouTube channel on the following day.

Save the Date: North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium (NEPH) Spring 2024 Symposium, April 12–14

Yale Public Humanities is excited to host the Spring 2024 NEPH Symposium from April 12–14, 2024 on campus. NEPH fosters public projects animated by humanistic inquiry in support of art, culture, history, and education for a more democratic society. Linking eleven diverse institutions across the region, the consortium provides opportunities for faculty, students, professionals, and community members to build partnerships and enhance the relationship between liberal arts and the public through public humanities practices such as historic preservation, oral history, public history, material culture, curation and exhibition, documentary work, digital humanities, public art, cultural heritage, and more.

Save the date and learn more at the NEPH website!

News

Some highlights of Public Humanities–affiliated faculty,
graduate students in the certificate program, and alumni:

Applications are due today for the Fall 2023 Public Humanities Micro-Credential: The Art Museum Exhibition. This new public humanities micro-credential course, an opportunity available to eight graduate students, will meet in-person and over Zoom (to accommodate guest speakers) during the fall 2023 term. Read more and apply by today - Tuesday, September 5th.

With Public Humanities' support, PhD candidates Kohar Avakian and Iman AbdoulKarim launched Name It!, a podcast dedicated to making academic scholarship accessible to public audiences. Their nine-episode first season introduced key works in black feminist thought and critical race theory to 1800 listeners and received over 2700 downloads. You can listen to Name It! on all streaming platforms and learn more about the project at nameitpod.com. They are currently working on Season 2, so be sure to follow Name It! on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Instagram to be notified when it launches.

Moving into its second year, the New Haven Research Collaborative, a working group of arts and humanities leaders from across New Haven, recently undertook a bus tour of New Haven cultural institutions. The group is working on new ways to share organizational resources, build relationships, and enhance cultural resilience.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, received a 2023 FAS Dean's Award for Inclusion and Belonging. First awarded in 2021, the award recognizes ladder and instructional faculty who have helped create and sustain a climate of inclusion and belonging in the FAS. Read more at Yale News.

Crystal Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and History, was named a member of the newly formed Yale Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement (CARE). The committee will work with members of the campus and New Haven communities to commission works of art and related programming to address Yale’s historical roles and associations with slavery and the slave trade as well as the legacy of that history. Read more from Yale's Office of the President.

Grace Kao, the IBM Professor of Sociology and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, was interviewed by The Korea Times about the cultural and economic impacts of K-Pop. Read the full conversation here.

Michael Denning, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies and Professor of English and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, joined Jacobin's Daniel Denvir for a conversation on Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Read the full interview at Jacobin.

A February 2023 performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Emily Coates, Professor in the Practice of Theater and Performance Studies and Public Humanities affiliate, and Lacina Coulibaly, was documented in a new film by director Habib Azar. This production, co-presented by the Yale Dance Lab and the Yale Symphony Orchestra, marked the first creative work produced and staged at the Schwarzman Center. Read more at Yale News.

Veronica Waweru, Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Council on African Studies at the MacMillan Center, was quoted as an expert in a New York Times article on the repatriation of artifacts from Kenya in museums. Read the full piece here.

Beverly Gage, newly appointed as the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her biography of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2023). Read more at the Pulitzer Prizes website.

The Yale Review published a folio of responses to Caleb Smith's 2023 book Thoreau's Axe: Direction and Discipline in American Culture (Princeton University Press) from writers Ana Schwartz, Laura Dassow Walls, and Daegan Miller. Read the folio at The Yale Review.

As always, we welcome any news submissions from the Public Humanities at Yale community, including publications, events, career updates, and anything else you'd like to share! Send us a note at publichumanities@yale.edu.