In his introductory remarks at the opening of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center in February 1981, director Peter Brooks said he regarded its founding a “happily subversive event.”
“For we all know that the humanities in America are not in a good way, even within the educational establishment,” Brooks, now Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus, went on. “It is unusual to find a university in the year 1981 reaffirming, as Yale does today, the centrality of the humanities.”
In the 45 years since, the Whitney Humanities Center has helped the humanities flourish at Yale, even as support for the humanities has continued to decline at some other institutions. The center has become a hub of sorts, connecting various programs and scholars, sponsoring major lecture series, and encouraging conversations across the disciplines.
On Thursday, April 16, and Friday, April 17, the center, located in the Humanities Quadrangle, will celebrate its 45th anniversary with a conference titled “The Humanities, the University, and the World.” The conference opens on Thursday afternoon with a celebration of creativity and literary talent, featuring faculty from across the university. On Friday, leading thinkers and public intellectuals from across the country will gather with Yale faculty for a series of panel discussions examining the role of the humanities in today’s world and in the future.
Director Cajetan Iheka at the weekly Fellows Forum.
“Some of the questions we’re asking now have been asked at different points in different places,” said Cajetan Iheka, the center’s current director and a professor of English in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). “The question of what it means to be human. How do we relate and engage with each other across differences? These questions remain enduring. They’re worth asking again and again, despite the different historical, social, and political circumstances that may shape the questions.”
Here are five more things to know about the current work of the center in anticipation of its anniversary celebration.
1. One of the center’s founding goals was to reduce isolationism among scholars, a role it continues to play.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, the Yale president who helped found the Whitney Humanities Center, said at its opening that he hoped it would aid the university in addressing isolationism and fragmentation among its scholars, particularly the younger ones.
The center is still very focused on that work through its fellows program, which invites scholars from across the university to participate in intellectual exchange, including FAS faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and colleagues from Yale Law School, the School of Medicine, and the School of the Environment.
“There’s not a stipend — what they get is community,” said Diane Berrett Brown, the center’s deputy director. “They are invited to attend a lunch every week with a speaker. We sit at four-top tables and there are 30 minutes for conversation before the talk begins. I’ve been amazed by the connections that come out of that, as well as all kinds of formal and informal mentorship.”
2. The center has added to its efforts in recent years with a certificate program in the environmental humanities.
The WHC Graduate Fellows in the Environmental Humanities examine sassafras leaves during a trip to Horse Island.
Six years ago, in an effort to better support graduate students, the center decided to partner with Yale Environmental Humanities to create the Whitney Fellowship in the Environmental Humanities, a certificate program for first-year Ph.D. students in the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The program works with about a dozen students a year from across a range of disciplines.
“The program succeeds from the first time the students meet because you have students from anthropology, French, English, history, but who all have this common interest in environmental humanities,” Brown said. “And that’s where a lot of the energy in the humanities is right now.”
3. The center’s “faculty bookshelf” celebrates publishing successes across the humanities.
In the front foyer of the Humanities Quadrangle, a digital “bookshelf” on a big screen features a rotating display of the covers of recently published and forthcoming books by Yale faculty.
The display is intended to acknowledge and celebrate the work of Yale scholars, as well as to publicize it in an eye-catching way.
“When we send some faculty members a copy of the slide displaying their book, you would think we’ve given them the greatest gift,” Brown said. “But that’s one of our roles, to know who’s doing what. We also do a big book party once a year.”
Yale scholars perusing books at the WHC’s annual Faculty Book Party.
4.The 45th anniversary conference will include many nationally and internationally known thinkers.
The center has gathered an illustrious group of scholars for its panels, which will consider the university’s purpose and promise, the humanities at a global scale, and the humanities today and tomorrow.
A full list is on the conference website, but a sampling includes:
- Wendy Brown, a political theorist who is the UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton;
- Christopher Newfield, director of research at the Independent Social Research Foundation, in London;
- Amitav Ghosh, the Indian novelist, essayist, and scholar; and,
- Roosevelt Montás, author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.”
5. Several former directors will participate in the conference.
While Iheka will open the panel discussions on Friday, he won’t be the only Whitney Humanities Center director participating in the conference.
Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French who served as director from 2020 to mid-2023, will do a reading at the Thursday afternoon event.
Gary Tomlinson, Sterling Professor of Music & the Humanities who served as director from 2012 to 2020, will lead one of the panel discussions.
And Peter Brooks, the founding director, will participate in the panel discussion on “The University: Purpose and Promise.”
