News

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

Monica Muñoz Martinez, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, has been named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. During her time as a graduate student at Yale in 2007, Martinez co-founded the Public Humanities at Yale program and went on to receive her PhD in American Studies in 2012. The MacArthur Foundation praised Martinez for “bringing to light long-obscured cases of racial violence along the U.S.-Mexico border and their reverberations in the present” through her research and public humanities projects. Read the full award announcement here.

Clara Mejía Orta, PhD student in History, recently completed a summer Public Humanities grant project. Essential NOT Disposable Oral History Project was a semi-structured interview style oral history project focused on archiving the lived experiences of union meatpacking workers during the pandemic. The primary objective of the project was to record testimonios from workers reflecting on their  experiences during the pandemic working in the meatpacking industry. Ten interviews were conducted with Latinx workers who worked in plants with high rates of COVID-19 infections. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2 Union became the host organization and provided connections to workers in four meatpacking plants in Kansas and Oklahoma. UFCW Local 2 represents workers in the grocery, retail, meat packing and other industries across Kansas, Missouri, and the Panhandle of Oklahoma. This project was possible with their support alongside with the generous funding from the Public Humanities Program at Yale and additional funds from the Oral History Association.

Ned Blackhawk, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada, will serve as co-director of the newly-established NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project, a collaboration between Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and NYU School of Law. The Sovereignty Project will support research on Native governance and resistance to U.S. colonialism.

Emily Coates, Professor in the Practice of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale, joined Yale architecture student and dancer Max Wirsing for an interview in Issue 2 of Maquette, an interdisciplinary journal published by Yale's Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. Read the full conversation, titled "New Geometries," here.

Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, published an article on Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski in the New York Review of Books, titled "The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz." The article is adapted from Snyder's foreword to Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories, an English-language anthology of Borowski's writings published in September 2021 by Yale University Press.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of History and Director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and Crystal Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and History at Yale, recently moderated a public conversation entitled "Gleaming in the Shadow of Slavery: A Conversation with Descendants of African Americans of Old Yale." Watch the conversation on YouTube here. 

Yale's historical entanglements with slavery and racism will be the theme of the Gilder Lehrman Center's upcoming annual conference, Yale and Slavery in Historical Perspective, on October 28-30. More information is available here.

Tavia Nyong'o, William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African American Studies at Yale, has been appointed Curator of Public Programming at the Park Avenue Armory, a contemporary art center in New York featuring a 55,000 square foot exhibition hall and period rooms. Read the full announcement here.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale, recently appeared on NPR's All Things Considered to discuss Latin American migration into the U.S. Listen to the full segment and read a transcript here.

Daphne Brooks, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale, has received the 2021 Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for an Article in the Pop Music Field from the ASCAP Foundation (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) for her New York Times article, "100 Years Ago, ‘Crazy Blues’ Sparked a Revolution for Black Women Fans." Read more about the 2021 award recipients here.

Puzzling The Humanities

Click the "START THE PUZZLE" button below to play our September crossword puzzle: "I-V League." This month's puzzle was created by Matthew Stock, Yale College '18, and Rachel Fabi, Yale College '11.

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