Dirt and dirtiness are ubiquitous — but the ways we conceive of it vary in ways both cultural and personal. In her new book, “Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos” (Duke University Press), Yale English Professor...
During her 50 years as a teacher, almost 30 of them at Yale, Sterling Professor of English Ruth Yeazell ’71 Ph.D. has sometimes wondered if, fired up by her literary passions, she talks too much in her classes.
So, in two of her three classes this...
When Thomas Allen Harris learned his brother was HIV positive in the early 1990s, he did the only thing he could think of to cope with the news: He picked up a video camera to chronicle his brother’s life.
At that time, the diagnosis was a “death sentence...
So intense was her grief after her husband’s sudden death that noted poet Elizabeth Alexander ’84 could only produce what she calls “animal sounds” when she first put pen to paper to write of her experience.
Those “sounds” eventually became sentence...
Mark Baldwin, a member of the Brothertown Indian Nation, had what he describes as a “transcendent experience” during a recent visit to Yale.
For the first time in his life, he heard hymnal music composed by one of his tribal ancestors and sung in the...
While being honored March 8 by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas with its eighth Visionary Leadership Award, poet Claudia Rankine described an encounter that she said is not all that uncommon for her. A white man approached to her to tell her...
The ways in which artist Robert Rauschenberg and choreographer Paul Taylor were influenced by each other’s artistry will be explored in a talk by art historian Robert Mattison at the Yale University Art Gallery on Feb. 7.
The event, which will begin at 4...
From 2006 to 2013, director John Lucas followed the journeys of four men in prison and made a documentary film, “The Cooler Bandits,” about them.
Following a campus screening of “The Cooler Bandits,” Lucas and members of the film’s cast will take part in...
The response that now world-renowned author Karl Ove Knausgård received to his written work when he was in his 20s — at the start of his career — was far out of alignment with his intense yearning to be a writer.
He shared a manuscript with a friend he...