From 2001 to 2010, Yale historian Alan Mikhail lived in Cairo where he conducted research within the massive, state-run Egyptian National Archives. From his perch in the archive’s reading room, Mikhail took careful note of the myriad, maddening...
A few years ago, composer Matthew Suttor was exploring Alan Turing’s archives at King’s College, Cambridge, when he happened upon a typed draft of a lecture the pioneering computer scientist and World War II codebreaker gave in 1951 foreseeing the rise of...
Yale historian Ned Blackhawk has won a National Book Award for “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” an ambitious and sweeping volume that documents the central role of Native Americans in the political and...
It was a 2006 exhibition focused on melancholy in Western Art at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin that planted a seed for Nana Adusei-Poku thinking about how grief, mourning, and sadness are expressed by artists of the African Diasporas.
“No artists of...
Richard Deming was at work on an essay about the 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York” when he received an unexpected phone call from an old friend. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the star of that very film, had just been found dead of a drug overdose.
The news was...
You’re staring at your officemates from the comfort of your home. They’re lined up on the Zoom screen, each against their preferred backdrops, each exposing only as much of their surroundings as they like.
You’re in your own space, but partly in theirs as...
Julian Posada spent the COVID lockdown researching the working conditions of Latin Americans who do much of the data work needed for the growing artificial intelligence industry. And he became increasingly frustrated that discussions about the ethics of...
In the latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, a book that centers Native Americans in the country’s history earns national acclaim; a boundary-smashing artist brings a “sensory circuit workout” to campus; a Yale...
Patrick Del Percio first showed an interest in learning the Cherokee language at the age of seven, when their family visited a living history museum portraying a 1760s Cherokee village. Del Percio asked the tour guide for the Cherokee word for “hello.”...