February 18, 2026  |  7:00pm  |  53 Wall Street Auditorium
Screening and Q&A: The Daytrippers

Join us for a special screening of The Daytrippers (1996), a comedy-drama film starring Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci, Anne Meara, Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Greg Mottola, moderated by Richard Deming (Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing at Yale). Performed with deadpan virtuosity by a top-flight ensemble cast, The Daytrippers is a wry and piercing look at family bonds stretched to the breaking point.

April 16, 2026  |  5:00pm  |  La Casa (301 Crown Street)
La Planta: Latinx Worker Survival in U.S. Slaughterhouses

Join us next semester for PhD student Clara Mejía Orta's Public Humanities Certificate capstone project where she will share visuals and audio from meatpacking workers interviewed for her thesis "La Planta: Latinx Worker Survival in U.S. Slaughterhouses." The event will feature a Q&A with meatpacking workers and UFCW organizers as well as a gallery walk featuring meatpacking worker portraits by Lavaca Studios. Light refreshments will be served. 

Date/Time/Location TBD
"Poetry and Practice" Practicum

This spring, we will host a micro-credential practicum on "Poetry and Practice" as part of our Arts Research concentration, which invites students to explore the intersections between scholarly research and artistic work and undertake archivally-driven projects in the performing or visual arts.

Thursdays, 1:30–3:20pm
Introduction to Public Humanities course

Associate Director Karin Roffman will teach the "Introduction to Public Humanities" course (AMST 4403/AMST 9003/HIST 7260/PHUM9003) for the Spring 2026 semester. This course is an introduction to the various media, topics, debates, and issues framing public humanities. It addresses the relationship between knowledge produced in the university and the circulation of ideas among a broader public, including modes of inquiry, interpretation, and presentation. Topics include public history, museum studies, oral and community history, public art, documentary film and photography, public writing and educational outreach, and the socially conscious performing arts.

Thursdays, 1:30–3:20pm
Empathetic Storytelling and Human Rights course

Heide Fehrenbach and Daphne Geismar will teach Empathetic Storytelling and Human Rights" (CSYC 2310) for the Spring 2026 semester. This course examines empathetic storytelling as a defining feature of human rights narratives, from eighteenth-century literature to contemporary media. Students analyze "Invisible Years," Daphne Geismar’s acclaimed book—and film adaptation—about her family’s experiences of separation, hiding, and survival in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. We trace the historical roots of humanitarian storytelling, including the role of photography in eliciting viewer emotion, and examine the current debates around empathy as a rhetorical strategy, particularly recent criticisms of it as a potentially manipulative tool for social change. This course emphasizes discussion and the civil exchange of perspectives. In the first half of the course, students evaluate the features and future prospects of effective contemporary storytelling as well the historical concerns and techniques that produced it. During the second half of the course, students develop practical skills in collaborative research, as well as narrative construction and visual storytelling, culminating in an individual print or video project focused on a historical or contemporary human rights event. The seminar includes a studio-style component in which students refine their projects with feedback from instructors and peers.

October 10: Three Conversations on Contemporary Biography

Public Humanities and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library co-sponsored a symposium on contemporary biography featuring a distinguished lineup of writers: Heather Clark on Red Comet, her 2021 biography of Sylvia Plath; Farah Jasmine Griffin on If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery, her 2001 biography of Billie Holiday; Robin D. G. Kelley on The Life and Times of an American Original, his 2017 biography of Thelonious Monk; Nathan Kernan on A Day Like Any Other, his 2025 biography of James Schuyler; Eileen Myles on a "Working Life", their 2024 poetry collection; and Francesca Wade on An Afterlife, her 2025 biography of Gertrude Stein. Public Humanities Associate Director Karin Roffman introduced the symposium, with panel introductions by Eve Sneider, Langdon Hammer, and Melissa Barton.

November 6: Augmented Fotonovelas with Leigh-Anna G. Hidalgo

In November, the Public Humanities Working Group invited Prof. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo (Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale) for a colloquium about Augmented Fotonovelas. Prof. Hidalgo’s distinguished digital humanities project portrays alternative narratives of migrant food vendors in Los Angeles, California. Through collaborative partnerships, Augmented Fotonovelas produces alternative community-centered knowledge that conveys the indispensability of street vendors to local urban economies. We wrapped up our colloquium with a fruitful dialogue between Prof. Hidalgo and graduate students interested in collaborative knowledge-production methods. 

December 1: Day With(out) Art Film Screening: Blue (1993) and Meet Us Where We're At (2025)

In recognition of the 2025 Day With(out) Art and World AIDS Day, the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, and Public Humanities at Yale partnered with arts nonprofit Visual AIDS to present a special double screening. The program began with Blue (1993), the final film by director Derek Jarman, which meditates on the experience of AIDS with unflinching clarity, against a single field of blue. Lily Waterton (Jock Reynolds Fellow in Public Programs, Yale University Art Gallery) introduced the film.

After an intermission and reception, the program continued with Meet Us Where We’re At (2025), a collection of six short videos commissioned by Visual AIDS as part of its annual program. The videos highlight the experiences of drug users and harm-reduction practices as they intersect with the ongoing HIV crisis, featuring work by Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), and José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico). Jackson Davidow (Project Manager for Public Engagement, Yale Center for British Art) introduced the anthology.

December 2025–February 2026: Oral History Micro-Credential with Mary Marshall Clark

Public Humanities is pleased to host an micro-credential practicum on oral history with Mary Marshall Clark, the Director of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research and co-founding director of Columbia’s Master of Arts degree in Oral History. Over four meetings, which began earlier this month, Mary Marshall Clark is leading a public humanities micro-credential on the uses of oral history in a multidisciplinary framework as a form of living research and testimony. She will lead the class in exploring multidisciplinary methods, including oral history interviewing, analysis and public forms of dissemination. Class members will conduct at least one interview, based on in-class fieldwork training and co-interviewing. The class will also cover the evaluation of interviews for public and academic use, and ethical protocols for interviewing people in vulnerable situations. Mutual listening, with embodiment in mind, will be a strong methodological focus. 

This micro-credential is part of our History and the Public research area. All of our micro-credentials are open to Yale graduate students from any program or discipline. Stay tuned for more information on a Spring 2026 micro-credential practicum on "Poetry and Practice" as part of our Arts Research concentration