End-of-Year Message

Dear Public Humanities community,

As another academic year concludes, we wanted to wish everyone a restful summer and reflect on some of the highlights of this year's Public Humanities programming.

Our Democracy in America series, cosponsored with the New Haven Free Public Library, continued in 2023–24 with two remarkable public conversations held at the library. In September 2023, Robin D. G. Kelley of UCLA visited New Haven for a Democracy in America talk with Matthew Jacobson about Jacobson's recent book, Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of California Press, 2023). And this February, American Studies PhD student and film director Sylvia Ryerson held a screening and talkback on her 2023 film Calls From Home with Matthew Jacobson and Elizabeth Hinton for a full-capacity crowd at the library.

Our student-run Public Humanities Working Group (PHWG), co-facilitated by PhD students Nancy Escalante (American Studies) and Clara Mejía Orta (History), organized a robust series of socials and talks throughout the academic year, including presentations by Nancy Escalante on "counter-archives" and the María Guardado Collective, Dario Valles on digital storytelling and the asylum crisis at the US-Mexico border, and Clara Mejía Orta on oral history and meatpacking workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Public Humanities also co-sponsored a variety of remarkable one-off events, including a video screening about HIV and disability to mark World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art on December 1; a book talk and musical performance in January with author Jeremy Eichler and violist-educator Sebastian Ruth on Eichler's book, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Penguin Random House, 2023); a performance and workshop series with poet-musician Cornelius Eady and reading of Eady's verse-play Brutal Imagination performed by Joe Morton and Sally Murphy, co-hosted by the Beinecke Library and in conjunction with Marian Huggins’s Urban Experience Reading Group at the New Haven Free Public Library; a cosponsored exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum, Resonance of Things Unseen: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, & Private Correspondence; and more.

Finally, we closed off the year on a high note by hosting the 2024 Symposium of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium (NEPH). Since launching NEPH—a rotating conference of 8 partner public humanities programs at private and public universities—at Yale in spring 2015, the NEPH gathering returned to Yale for the first time in April. 80 faculty and graduate students registered for our Friday afternoon site visits (see the linked descriptions) and evening dinner and keynote by Adriane V. Jefferson, introduced by Deputy Director of the New Haven Free Public Library Luis Chavez-Brumell. Below are photos of the wonderful evening at the library, enjoying the terrace overlooking the New Haven Green

Saturday, April 13, included an inspiring “lightning” round—current graduate student public humanities students giving 6-minute talks; an extraordinary “thunder” round—the new public humanities projects of NEPH alumni; and a compelling afternoon panel on current faculty projects, including work by Cyra Levenson at the Guggenheim, Anna Reisman at Yale Medical School, Daniel HoSang in American Studies, Elihu Rubin in American Studies and Architecture, and Dicky Yangzom in Sociology. Check out the full NEPH 2024 schedule here and look out for news in the fall about the location and date for NEPH 2025.

After a busy and dynamic year, we wish everyone a healthy summer and look forward to seeing you all again on campus in the fall. If you have questions, ideas for programming, or interest in joining the Public Humanities Working Group, feel free to email us at publichumanities@yale.edu. 

News

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

Three affiliates of Public Humanities—Ned Blackhawk (Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies), Tavia Nyong'o (Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies), and Doug Rogers (Professor and Chair of Anthropology)—were among the 188 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists awarded 2024 fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. They join a total of seven Yale faculty members awarded the fellowship this year. Read more at Yale News.

Robert Dubrow (Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health) has published an article titled "The Tremendous Public Health Opportunity of Climate Action" in Yale Public Health Magazine. Read the full piece here.

Langdon Hammer (Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English) has published "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free," a piece on grief in the verse of Catherine Barnett, in The American Scholar. Read the full piece here.

Grace Kao (IBM Professor of Sociology and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration) has published an opinion piece in The Korea Herald about American racism against K-pop group Stray Kids. Read the full piece here.

John MacKay has been appointed the Henry S. McNeil Professor of Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literature. Read the press release here.

Daniel Martinez HoSang (Professor of American Studies) and the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale presented 15 workshops on the history and contemporary afterlives of Eugenics at Yale on campus, including the Departments of Genetics, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Comparative Medicine, Anthropology and Linguistics. Their team also collaborated with colleagues at the Peabody Museum to advise a new display showcasing some of Yale’s historic connections to the American Eugenics movement. Finally, they hosted several visits to the archives by K-12 teachers in Connecticut to explore the influences of Eugenics on contemporary education practices.

Joanne Meyerowitz (Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and Professor of American Studies) has published an exploration of the "women's empowerment" concept in Time magazine, titled "How ‘Women’s Empowerment’ Lost Its Meaning." Read the full piece here.

Tavia Nyong'o (Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies) has published "Remembering Cecilia Gentili’s Singular Artistry in Hyperallergic," a commemoration of activist and artist Cecilia Gentili, who passed earlier this year. Read the full piece here.

The Yale Urban Media Project, facilitated by Elihu Rubin (Associate Professor of Urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture), launched its first two issues of the New Haven Building Newsprint, a publication exploring local architecture and urbanism. Read more about the launch at Yale Daily News.

Puzzling The Humanities

Click the "START THE PUZZLE" button below to play this month's crossword puzzle. This puzzle was created by Matthew Stock, Yale College '18.

From The Archive

For More Information

Follow Us