Public Humanities at Yale | E-Newsletter | November–December 2022
Season's greetings from the Public Humanities at Yale crew and, for those of us who live by the semester system, we wish you rest and good health as we approach the finish line! For this newsletter, we wanted to compile and reflect on the Public Humanities programming that took place during the Fall 2022 term, including Democracy in America webinars, film screenings, Public Humanities Working Group talks, and more. As always, this newsletter also includes updates from our Public Humanities students and affiliated faculty and a new Puzzling the Humanities crossword puzzle from Matthew Stock, Yale College '18, and Rachel Fabi, Yale College '11.
Please feel free to write us with any questions, suggestions, or news updates at publichumanities@yale.edu, and we look forward to seeing you in the spring!
"North Side of George Street, Between Temple and Church, New Haven, Connecticut, 1959," New Haven Free Public Library Digital Collections.
Event Series on Writing in the Age of Crisis, in Conjunction with Leah Mirakhor’s Public Writing Course: Writer/Rioter
Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 5:30–7:30pm EDT
Celebrating the Life, Art, and Legacy of Winfred Rembert
In collaboration with Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory, Public Humanities helped welcome some 200 members of the New Haven community and the Rembert family to an event honoring the longtime New Haven resident and renowned artist Winfred Rembert (1945-2021). Rembert was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia, whose paintings have been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country. His memoir Chasing Me to My Grave, as told to Erin I. Kelly, was awarded a 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. The event, held at NXTHVN, featured a discussion with Rembert’s wife Patsy and his co-author Erin Kelly, as well as a panel about the legacy of Rembert’s work with with Elizabeth Hinton, Dwayne Betts and moderated by the Yale School of Art Dean Kymberly Pinder.
Wednesday, November 2, 2022 | 5:30–7:00pm EDT
Writing Histories of the Present: Featuring Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor in Conversation with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Elizabeth Hinton
In collaboration with African American Studies, American Studies and the Yale Law School Justice Collaboratory, Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor joined Yale’s Elizabeth Hinton and Daniel Martinez HoSang in a conversation about their works on writing histories of resistance and rebellion and how these histories can shape a path toward wider collective freedom and justice. Taylor is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, as well as From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. The event was attended by over a hundred students and members of the New Haven community and featured Possible Future Bookstore, who facilitated a book signing by the authors.
SAVE THE DATE!
Wednesday, January 25, 2023 | Time and Location TBD
Poetry in a Time of War: Featuring Ilya Kaminsky with Marci Shore and Dwayne Betts
In collaboration with The Yale Review, poet Ilya Kaminsky will join historian Marci Shore and poet and founder of Freedom Reads Dwayne Betts in a wide ranging conversation about the ways the ways in poetry and writing is a witness to the ongoing state violence, war, and catastrophe in Ukraine and the U.S.
Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic and Dancing In Odessa and co-editor and co-translator of many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. His poems have been translated into over twenty languages and in 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.
Public Humanities Working Group and Student-Led Programming
Monday, October 10, 2022 | 4:30–6:00pm EDT
Public Humanities Fall 2022 Speaker Series: Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
The Public Humanities Working Group relaunched its programming this fall with a talk featuring Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, a geographer whose work explores the intersections between geography, art, and public humanities. Jelly-Schapiro spoke about his latest book, Names of New York: Discovering the City's Past, Present, and Future Through its Place-Names (Pantheon, 2021) and his relationship to the public humanities.
Thursday, October 13, 2022 | 4:00–5:45pm EDT
"Beyond Walls: Filmmaking for Prison Abolition"
The Whitney Humanities Center and Public Humanities cosponsored a double bill screening of two films about life within prisons that can help us imagine a future without them: American Studies PhD candidate Sylvia Ryerson’s Calls from Home and Adamu Chan’s What These Walls Won’t Hold, which were both awarded funding by Working Films through the 2021 Docs in Action Film Fund. Matthew Jacobson moderated a post-screening discussion about filmmaking for prison abolition with the filmmakers and Andy Myers, Director of Campaigns and Strategy at Working Films.
Thursday, November 10, 2022 | 4:30–6:00pm EST
“Public Humanities Speaker Series: Eilin Pérez - On the Archival Arts: A Vision for the Public Humanities"
This semester, we were thrilled to welcome Eilin Pérez to Yale as a Postdoctoral Associate in History with an emphasis in Public Humanities. Pérez is a specialist on Korean diplomatic history and joins Yale from the University of Chicago, where he completed a PhD in History. This Autumn, Pérez delivered a lecture for the Public Humanities Working Group entitled “On the Archival Arts: A Vision for the Public Humanities.” In it, he proposed creativity in collaboration among scholars, curators, librarians, and archivists towards the production and dissemination of knowledge. This Spring he will draw upon these principles while teaching a course in the Department of History (cross-listed with East Asian Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration) entitled Korea in the World.
Democracy in America Webinars
Tuesday, October 25, 2022 | 7:00–8:00pm EDT
“Cultural Equity: A Road Map to Advancing Equity in the City of New Haven in ALL of Our Communities"
Adriane Jefferson, Director of Cultural Affairs for the City of New Haven and Executive Director of New Haven Festivals, Inc., joined Public Humanities' Director Matthew Jacobson for a conversation about the city's groundbreaking Cultural Equity Plan, released this year. You can watch a recording on the Public Humanities YouTube channel, where we archive nearly all of our webinars. This evemt was presented as part of the ongoing Democracy in America series, co-organized with our friends at the New Haven Free Public Library.
Tuesday, November 15, 2022 | 7:00–8:00pm EST
“Spaces for Democracy: The Goffe Street Armory as Civic Infrastructure"
Elihu Rubin, Associate Professor of Urbanism at Yale School of Architecture, discussed the history and future of the landmark Goffe Street Armory with Matthew Jacobson. You can view the recording on YouTube or read more about the conversation in this Yale Daily News article. This webinar was presented as part of the ongoing Democracy in America series, co-organized with our friends at the New Haven Free Public Library.
News
Some highlights of Public Humanities-affiliated faculty,
graduate students in the certificate program, and alumni:
Public Humanities alum Joseph Plaster (PhD '18) will publish Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in March 2023 with Duke University Press. The book explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States, and San Francisco’s Tenderloin in particular. Plaster draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to represent the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed street kids to foster social support and mutual aid. Since receiving his PhD from Yale in 2018, Plaster has been working as Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. He cultivates an exchange of knowledge between the university and greater Baltimore region through participatory action research, oral history initiatives, performance-based collaborations including the Peabody Ballroom Experience, and community-engaged undergraduate courses.
Ben Doolittle, Professor at Yale School of Medicine and Professor of Religion and Health at Yale Divinity School, collaborated with artist Ye Qin Zhu (MFA '20) to research and produce a COVID memorial artwork that was recently installed outside the Boardman Building at the School of Medicine (330 Cedar Street). Read more about the project here.
Crystal Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies, served as a faculty expert for a recent Smithsonian Magazine piece on Rebecca Latimer Felton, the United States' first woman senator. Feimster offered historical perspective on Felton, an outspoken white supremacist and the last member of Congress to have enslaved people. Read the full piece here.
Ned Blackhawk, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies, reviewed Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (2022) for The Washington Post, arguing that it reinforces "a narrative of Indigenous decline at odds with the book’s emphasis on Native American power." Read the full review here.
Beverly Gage, Professor of History and American Studies, has published G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Penguin Random House, 2022), a new biography that reframes the legacy of the infamous FBI director. The book has garnered critical acclaim from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and numerous other outlets.
Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science, was appointed by French President Emmanuel Macron to a governance committee overseeing a citizens’ convention that will reconsider France’s laws on assisted suicide and euthanasia, a remarkable experiment in using citizens’ assemblies to guide policymaking. Read more at Yale News.
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.
Puzzling The Humanities
Click the "START THE PUZZLE" button below to play this month's crossword puzzle: "It's Cold Outside" This puzzle was created by Matthew Stock, Yale College '18, and Rachel Fabi, Yale College '11.
From The Archive
Watch ▶ | 1 hour
From the Archive
In November 2020, Jennifer Richeson, the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology, spoke with Matthew Jacobson about the psychological and political backlash against diversity. Watch the full one-hour Democracy in America conversation here.
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