In the latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, a “brazenly assured work” about trans identity wins the latest Yale Drama Series Prize; the School of Architecture reflects on a historic collaboration between a legendary Yale architect and colleagues at the University of Tuskegee in the 1960s; scholars, librarians, and archivists address the fate of the Black historical and cultural record in an era of AI and hybrid archives; and three of Yale’s storied singing societies gather at Battell Chapel to commemorate the 1909 founding of a legendary a cappella group.
For more, visit an archive of arts and humanities coverage at Yale News.
Yale Drama Series Prize honors ‘this dry spell’
The playwright, filmmaker and performance artist Keegon Schuett recently received the prestigious Yale Drama Series Prize for their play “this dry spell,” an acclaimed production that, as Schuett describes it, celebrates trans identity “at a time when many places would like to erase us.”
Schuett, a playwright, filmmaker, and performance artist from Memphis, Tennessee who currently works with a collective of writers through Voices of the South, was honored during a recent reception at Yale Schwarzman Center and presented with the $10,000 David Charles Horn Prize. Their play was selected from more than 2,000 plays from 55 countries.
“This dry spell” was chosen for the prize by the playwright Jeremy O. Harris ’19 M.F.A., who has received multiple Tony nominations, including for his play, “Slave Play,” which was produced off-Broadway in 2018 and just concluded a run on the West End. It was the second time Harris judged the competition.
“In this time of immense political and social upheaval when it feels as though hopelessness is a cloud that hangs heavy over all our interactions, ‘this dry spell’ hit me like a cleansing rain,” Harris said. “It also felt like a brazenly assured work in a season that brought to me some of the most accomplished new plays I’ve read since taking on this post.”
Schuett, who is queer and gender non-conforming, said it was validating for their work to be recognized at such a prestigious level. “I wrote this play to help myself believe that the world could be a safe place for me,” they said. “I hid myself for years because it did not feel that way. There are many other people like me performing as drag artists, surviving as servers, and hesitating by the doors of public restrooms. Their stories matter. I hope this play nourishes them too.”
The celebration featured a staged reading of the play in the center’s Underground space, as part of the Artistic Congress in partnership with New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. Yale University Press will also publish the play, as it does every year in partnership with the Charles Horn Foundation, the sole financial supporter of the prize.
The other shortlisted playwrights for this year’s Yale Drama Series prize were Jess Edwards, Gina Femia, Duncan Gates, Ayvaunn Penn, Reid Pope, Michael Quinn, TyLie Shider, Kayla Stokes and Zachary Wilcox.
Paul Rudolph and the Tuskegee Chapel
“Materialized Space,” an exhibition now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, examines the career of the influential architect Paul Rudolph. Known for his bold use of concrete and complex spatial constructions, he became a luminary in the field during the mid-20th century and made Yale one of the leading institutions for modern architecture in the United States — and his design remains part of the local landscape, including the former Art + Architecture building on the Yale campus, a Brutalist landmark now known as Paul Rudolph Hall.
To coincide with that, Yale School of Architecture will host its own exhibition celebrating Rudolph. The new exhibition, “Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch,” will explore an often overlooked collaboration between Rudolph and two architects, Louis Fry Sr. and Col. John Welch, in the design and construction of the historic Tuskegee Chapel on the campus of Tuskegee University, an HBCU in Macon County, Alabama.
Tuskegee chapel under construction in 1969.
The exhibition, which will be on view from Jan. 9 to July 5, 2025, will highlight the evolution of the Tuskegee project (which was completed in 1969), the partnership between its collaborators, and how Fry and Welch “successfully translated Rudolph’s sculptural concrete form into a spiritual home in local brick that echoed and modernized the building vernacular of Tuskegee.”
It will feature, among other elements, architectural models of the chapel, full-scale brick replicas of Fry and Welch’s masonry details, construction drawings and concept sketches, a newly commissioned masonry sculpture by Tuskegee alumnus Myles Sampson, and recordings from Tuskegee’s Golden Voices Concert Choir.
To mark its opening, the School of Architecture will host a public lecture featuring Helen Brown Bechtel ’10 M.Arch., an architect and independent curator who curated the new exhibition, and Kwesi Daniels, chair of Tuskegee University’s Department of Architecture. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 9 in Hastings Hall, located in Paul Rudolph Hall.
Who owns the historical record?
Earlier this year, Yale’s Alex Gil helped convene a group of scholars, librarians, and archivists interested in trying to answer a big and complicated question: who owns and controls the Black historical and cultural record?
At the “Black Beyond Data” event, held at Johns Hopkins University, collaborators began digging into this overarching question by thinking about many related sub-queries: Who controls access to data about slavery? What happens when data about Black people is curated by people who are not Black? What would archival reparations look like?
The next phase of this conversation will happen on the Yale campus May 14-15, 2025. Gil, senior lecturer II and associate research faculty of digital humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and the Black Beyond Data team recently received a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to, among other things, fund a second Who Owns Black Data conference, as well as two more events into 2026.
“We wanted to bring together many different constituencies all related to the fate of the Black historical and cultural record in the 21st century,” said Gil. “We wanted to recenter the conversation outside of what we can call the GLAM sector — galleries, libraries, archives and museums — and connect it to scholars and community archives, which are independently run archives at the local level.”
Gil hopes to not only spark a national conversation, but by the project’s end, “to produce general protocols for how to ethically steward the Black historical and cultural record in the era of AI and hybrid archives — part analog, part digital — along with a database to help researchers find where relevant collections can be found, and who stewards them,” he said.
One of the group’s major concerns, he said, is that the library and archival profession is one of the least diverse professions in the United States. Another is that some important data sets for reconstructing Black ancestry — including the genealogy company Ancestry.com — are under the control of private investors or businesses. (The private equity firm Blackstone Group purchased Ancestry.com in 2021.)
Check the Who Owns Black Data website for updates.
Honors for two scholars of ancient Near East
A pair of faculty members in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, in the FAS, last month won two of three book awards given annually by the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), which honor work related to the history and/or religion of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.
Nadine Moeller, professor of Egyptian archaeology and the department chair, won the Frank Moore Cross Award for her role in editing the five-volume “Oxford History of the Ancient Near East” (Oxford University Press). A comprehensive survey of the history of the Near and Middle East essentially replaces the seminal “Cambridge Ancient History,” which Moeller notes was “groundbreaking at the time for its inclusion of social and cultural history as well as a great amount of archaeology.” Moeller shares the award with her co-editors, Karen Radner, from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Daniel T. Potts, from New York University.
And Eckart Frahm, the John M. Musser Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, won the Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award for his 2023 history, “Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire (Basic Books).” In an interview with Yale News last year, Frahm said Assyria’s most important legacy is the idea of empire itself — not just its dark side, but its advantages, including the ability to establish extensive trade and information networks.
“The empires of today no longer call themselves empires. But imperial ideologies, of course, are still very much in place,” Frahm said. “So I think Assyria can be said to mark the very beginning of a chain that runs from the first millennium BCE to the modern age.”
The ASOR book awards recognize work that offers a new synthesis of archaeological or textual evidence intended to reach an audience of scholars as well as the broader public. The awards were presented in November at ASOR’s annual meeting in Boston.
‘The very best of our disciplines’
Earlier this fall, three Yale faculty members were named fellows of the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences — an honor that, according to the academy, is reserved for scholars who have “attained distinction in any of the branches of study which it is the object of the Academy to promote.”
This year’s cohort of new fellows includes a total of 52 fellows from across the UK and 30 from universities overseas. The Yale faculty members joining the academy’s community of more than 1,700 scholars are:
- Lauren Benton, the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law. Benton is focused on the global history of European empires, the legal history of the British and Spanish empires, and the history of international law.
- Sunil Amrith, the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. Amrith specializes in the history of modern South and Southeast Asia, the history of Asian migration, and global environmental history.
- Richard Aslin, a senior research scientist at the Yale Child Study Center in the School of Medicine and a senior research scientist in the Department of Psychology. Aslin studies the psychological development of infants and young children with a focus on language learning, visual perception and the brain mechanisms that support those skills.
The British Academy promotes the humanities and social sciences, invests in research and projects, informs debate around major societal issues and challenges, and encourages international collaboration.
Celebrating 115 years of the Yale Whiffenpoofs
Last month, three of Yale’s storied singing societies — the Whiffenpoofs, Whim ’n Rhythm, and the Yale Glee Club — united for the “The Perfect Concert” in Battell Chapel to commemorate the founding of the Whiffenpoofs, the country’s oldest college a cappella group.
Since 1909, the Whiffenpoofs have become of Yale’s most celebrated traditions. Singing a mixture of old Yale tunes, jazz standards, and other hits from across the decades, the group performs hundreds of concerts around the world each year.
Joining current members for the recent celebration were Whiffs alums of all ages, singing historic arrangements from generations past and present. View more photos from the concert.
Written by Lisa Prevost and Kevin Dennehy.
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